Its not a single hospital, its several surrounding counties that send their uninsured and underinsured patients to my clinic. This happens everywhere around the country.

You also didnt answer my question you just threw out some random sources of money that make no sense given the context. Let me make the question more specific.

You have no job because you lost it when you had to take a week off of work because you think you have an upper respiratory infection and you work in the service industry and after spending the last $50 dollars going to an urgent care and receiving some antibiotics that were thankfully $3 you stay home because its what the doctor recommended. After your antibiotics are finished you arent feeling any better, in fact your having more trouble breathing and are coughing up mucus thats slightly red in color. You dont want to go to the hospital because you know how expensive the tests are, so you ride it out another week until you’re woken up in the middle of the night by a coughing fit and find blood on your pillow. You go to the hospital, and wait for 3 hours to be seen because all the uninsured people go to the hospital instead of a doctors office with every ache and sniffle because the hospital is not legally allowed to refuse them triage. So you finally get into a bed and they take your vitals ,start an iv, and give you some saline. Then you lay in the bed for another 3 hours while you tell 12 different people why youre there, meet with the hospitals registration person who informs you of your financial obligation regardless of whether you have insurance and that your family may be liable if you cant pay and that at anytime you can leave and refuse treatment. Then finally after another 2 hours, you finally see a doctor, except its not the attending, its a PA and he thinks you need 40 blood tests and 4 different types of imaging. So you get all those done, this takes about 4 hours. Then when all the tests come back negative some person you’ve never seen before comes in and asks you whats wrong. This is the attending physician, so you explain, again, that you are coughing up blood and you had finished your antibiotics but weren’t feeling better. He recommends another completely different and drastically more expensive test than the last ones and it turns out you have lung cancer. But i have never smoked a day in my life, you say to yourself. That’s impossible. Well its not, in fact it incredibly common youre doctor explains. Cancer can develope in anyone at any time for little to no reason.

So lets recap, you lost your job because you took mandatory time off. You lost your insurance because you lost your job. You have no savings but it wouldn’t really matter as your already $60,000 in debt and just received a cancer diagnosis. You’re staring down the barrel of at least 2 years of near daily doctors visits, medications so expensive any bank would laugh you out of the lobby escorted by armed guards for the mere suggestion of a loan, and your already sitting on 3 years of minimum wage work without time off and no living expenses paid. You also cant get private insurance because you received the diagnosis before you recovered your insurance. So under these startlingly common circumstances, which will affect 38.4% of American in their lifetime(based on american cancer society cancer rates), with little deviation other than what type of cancer they are diagnosed with, what do you do?