"You only go bankrupt if you're uninsured"
With copays and out of network stuff a lot of people will go bankrupt in case of a serious illness.
With copays and out of network stuff a lot of people will go bankrupt in case of a serious illness.
By law, those are capped for people with insurance. The maximum that you will have to pay out-of-pocket can be no more than about $7,000, and many private plans set the cap at a lot less.
$7,000 is a non-trivial amount, but it's not a large number of people that both are insured and can't afford their out-of-pocket maximum without bankruptcy.
This is the equivalent of a car payment for the rest of my working life.
It doesn't matter, because that's still capped.
The bills themselves aren't capped. The amount they are obligated to pay is. Insurers make up some of the difference, and the rest is forgotten about. (It's not written down in the accounting sense, because the hospital doesn't necessarily actually treat the entire billed amount as receivable.)
I explained in a top-level comment how this works and why it works this way.
Also worth mentioning, it's been broken for a while (e.g.: ACA is not even broken in yet).