This particular woman was bankrupted by hospital bills due to her child having cancer or something along those lines
About 25 years ago, an American friend of mine offered to recommend me to his boss at a company in Florida. He wanted me to join the company.
As nice as the climate in Florida is at least compared to the sleet-sideways-to-the-face-half-the-year we have here, I'm glad I did not take the offer. That situation with the cost of medicine is downright scary in the US. The insurance-based system simply does not work in its current form because of the perverse incentives involved. The system seems to be optimized to take as many people as possible to the cleaners.
I read an answer on Quora by an American (a retired registered nurse) whose husband (I don't know what he did for a living) had had a heart attack. He had to spend six days in a hospital of which three days were spent at an ICU. The bill was $250,000. What the actual fuck? Perhaps there was one zero too many in her answer. She said their insurance covered "most of it".
The average cost of coronary artery bypass surgery in the US is $123,000 (just the surgery without any add-ons). In Israel, the average cost is $28,000. I checked out what a private hospital where I live charges for such surgery and the total seemed to amount to about $30,000 to $50,000 with all the charges combined. Everyone pays a heavily subsidized price at the point of delivery, which amounts to a total of few hundred euros regardless of where the operation is done.
Source: https://www.debt.org/medical/hospital-surgery-costs/
The entire developed world (WE, AU, NZ, SG, JP, SK, IL) except for the USA has healthcare systems where medical bankruptcy is virtually unheard of. The healthcare system is the single most important reason I decided against even considering emigrating to the US. The advantage of the lower tax rate seems to be more than negated by the extremely expensive insurance premiums and copays (in addition to the lack other services I would've had to pay for out of my own pocket there) and I would still have run the risk of going bankrupt.
Of course, it's your country to run as you see fit but I think it would pay to look at what other countries at a similar level of development are doing and revamp the system or modify it. Regardless who you think should be responsible for bearing the costs, there seems to be something fucked up about the incentive structure. Switzerland is another country based on Calvinist moral principles and its healthcare system seems to be working better so perhaps it could serve as a basis for a reform in the US.
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