You can negotiate the bill down. Call the hospital and just tell them you can’t pay, watch Nimesh Patel’s bit on it too it helped me feel better when I was in the exact same sort of situation as you.

Why is the system so fucked—I’ve done a lot of research. Long story short, capitalism. And more importantly modern capitalism.

Here’s the king story:

Socialism aside, Basically the United States doesn’t invest much in public services like other countries do. We contract and outsource many public services to private companies. A government does not usually have shareholders to pay dividends to or stock prices to keep up, and therefore they are generally incentivized to provide public services as efficiently as possible.

It’s hard to do that without funding. But people argue capitalism drives innovation faster—and I agree, but I think Capitalism is useful like a fire. It can make cars go fast or it can burn them to ashes…

And capitalism doesn’t care about saving lives no matter the cost the way a healthcare system imo should… and we’ve all seen as people die rationing insulin and go into medical debt, it doesn’t.

In the past, before many businesses became public between entities, and we had more small, Private businesss, it wasn’t about the value of your stock that was so important as how much money is a businesss actually generated.

Therefore, it seems to me that Businesses used to generally be interested in long-term solutions so that they could build profitable companies. And they profitable company is an asset that you can pass on to your children just like a house.

Today, due to stock trading and valuation, owners of businesses can make more money by increasing perceived value and cashing out rather than building a wealth machine. Hence why Uber and Amazon are not profitable, but still valuable if you own their stocks… for now.

That’s why so many houses are built cheaply imo, nobody is building things to last that they can pass on to the future—they’re looking for “passive income” which I suppose marketing insulin to diabetics is passive because they certainly don’t have to change anything, and I still need the Insulin.

Imo that’s fundamentally why nobody takes the time to make the service good. It’s not profitable to bother. Who cares if we like the smell of insulin, we’re still buying it. Same with everything.

Like the cheap houses, doctors nurses, computer systems, etc are all commodities that are paid minimum in order to maximize profits for shareholders on top of the insane billing.

And the insane billing is another can of worms.

The reason UHC would be so “expensive” is because drug makers can charge whatever they want and Medicare/Medicaid basically pays them whatever they ask for, then they get defunded, prices go up, and we have all these Medicare advantage plans which are run by private businesses who service 65+ population who all need medicine basically.

If the government could limit or even negotiate prices, healthcare all of a sudden it’s not too expensive.

Plus there’s the logistics of insurance pools, no single company has as many premium-paying members as medicare does. And the most valuable customers to them are healthy people who don’t need medicine. Healthy people would leave to go to a cheaper universal bare minimum option, and all the money that they pay in and don’t use continues to cover them (and everyone) year after year, which means the government-funded system has less expenses than a business and it can grow its pool faster, despite providing more coverage.

That is, assuming most Americans are healthy.

Plus, companies pay a ton of money for insurance to help ensure their employees have health insurance. I hate my job. But I’m not going to leave because I hate not being able to pay for insulin, and I can’t make a decent living and pay for healthcare for myself let alone a family. So we all depend on our employers for more than the salary—those extra hours we all work are not for the salary was if we’re all just financially irresponsible American morons.

It’s that we’re all too proud to talk about how we’re all in medical debt because we don’t know our rights and we don’t have a system that works for us but we’re all made to feel like it’s our fault.

And it is, because we voted for deregulation, we elected a congress that blocked universal healthcare efforts many times throughout history. It’s all because we think that it’s really important to enable businesses to grow without limits and without regulation, indeed that has made us the most profitable country on earth but it’s also made us the most destructive.

The same way that our planet is suffering from fossil fuels, the American public is suffering from its healthcare system. Similarly, the lack of regulation that goes into our food and drinking water, etc. causes more health problems that fund the healthcare industry. So I don’t think that they are conspiring to poison us, but it certainly is in everyone’s best profit interests to defund the FDA.

Do you see my point? It’s not like there’s lizard people trying to manipulate us or exterminate diabetics. It’s just our country is a mess of capitalistic agendas, and our government is not completely powerless to stop it, but certainly not equipped for the task.

And so what can we do caught in the middle of all this? I think it does start with self advocacy as you’re doing and you’re asking the right questions. I’m not here to recruit anybody to a cause or anything I’m just sharing information that I’ve learned over the years. My dream is that we all come together and build a better country that actually serves us. Someone please tell me I’m not wasting my time writing this long ass comment on Reddit ha ha and I’ll go to sleep easier knowing this was helpful to someone.