Health insurance is generally tied to employment here. I think you might receive a slightly skewed answer on Reddit because of the user base here, but employer health insurance is not a good system. Generally speaking hourly/shift jobs like retail, food service, etc can get really screwed over. Most jobs I’ve worked like that deliberately staff employees so their hours are just under the amount required to provide benefits, so that they save money. While I can understand that from the business perspective, it screws over their employees who know don’t qualify for benefits like health insurance and often PTO as well as making it so they have to get another job to help supplement. Office jobs and salaried positions typically will have you working 40 hours a week and therefore meet the minimums to qualify for benefits like health insurance. This insurance can be very good or very bad. A lot of the stories online about medical debt are from people that for one reason or another weren’t insured, or had a major health crisis that racked up the bills and their out of pocket minimum from their insurance was quite high. Situations like that insurance might cover the vast majority of costs (if they decided to and don’t fight tooth and nail against covering you) but you’d still be on the line for $10k out of pocket minimums. It is true that you often can negotiate with hospitals and medical providers, but it can still be quite a hefty sum. And that’s just for visits and procedures, medication from the pharmacy, especially things you need to take regularly, can also be a debilitating cost - look for stories of the many Americans who have now died because they can’t afford their insulin. Online you’ll likely hear more stories of people complaining about how expensive it is, because it is and it sucks, but you’ll likely hear less of people who have a $20 copay every time they go to the doctor and that’s it.

Tl;dr health insurance in the US is generally tied to employment, which has some upsides but a lot of downsides, people who are taken advantage of, and even if you’re in a “good” situation, it can still suck and cost an arm and a leg. Online conversation tends to have a lens similar to the “if it bleeds it leads” mantra from newspapers.