>>Does this not seem absolutely absurd to anybody else?

It does, and it's shit like this that makes me absolutely convinced that US is a 3rd world country, where people have to weight their own health vs the financial cost. There's plenty of people saying they don't want to call an ambulance because they are worried what their bill would be. That people would risk their lives and that of their new born baby because there is a financial cost associated with staying at the hospital for another day is beyond absurd, it's like bad fiction about some distant society where things have gone horribly wrong, except that this is real and calls itself the greatest country in the world.