This is the problem with society...I provide a service and if a patient can't pay the bill they can simply file bankruptcy and avoid it. I don't see anyone allowing me to do that for my student loans. Before someone gets on my case about health care...I pose you this question. If I walk into a restaurant and order a meal and eat that meal and then decide I can't afford it there are legal ramifications. Eating is just as much a necessity as health care so where's the difference.
This is a lousy analogy.
You can't honestly compare a life-saving liver transplant or Whipple to
CHOOSING to walk into a RESTAURANT and eating a meal that, honestly, you probably don't need to survive.
In the analogy you provide (that of eating at a restaurant and then deciding that you can't afford that meal that you've just eaten), choosing to eat a meal at that particular place is an option. There are other options that, while they might not taste as good, are cheaper and are still enough to offer you sustenance. The bottom line is, though,
that you have choices.
In real life, though, the choice often comes down to choosing between a liver transplant that you can't afford and dying a horrible death from ESLD. What kind of choice is that?
(And before you start in on how people have a choice to drink alcohol or do IV drugs, I'm sure that you know as well as I do that many people need liver transplants secondary to things like PSC or alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency.)
Either get a job, or find a way to pay for your care. If you can't, well Medicare and Medicaid are available. If you don't qualify, well that's too bad for you. No one gurantees food or shelter which I view as being much more important so why health care?
This is a remarkably ingenuous post that shows an incredible distance from reality.
The people who are
MOST likely to be uninsured are the working middle-class. The upper class are likely to get insurance through their high-paying executive jobs, and the lower class qualify for government insurance. It's hard working people like my parents, and like Neuronix's parents, who worked INCREDIBLY hard (both parents held down full time jobs and worked overtime every weekend, AND raised a small child - all without knowing English), and are unable to afford insurance.
I am a hard working medical student. I have had, basically, catastrophic insurance for the last few years because I didn't qualify for my parents' insurance (which was equally s**tty, by the way), because it would have cost me over $1000 per month for anything better. And I wouldn't have even bought insurance, except that my school would have kicked me out otherwise.
It's not quite as simple as "get a job." I am literally floored at how little you seem to understand as to how expensive private health insurance is.
Why should they get the shaft because you and patients like you decide they'll just discharge their bills by filing bankruptcy.
Why is it so hard for you to understand?
It's not a question of, "Oh, I'm lazy and I got this expensive liver transplant....so I'll just decide to declare bankruptcy! What an easy option!" It's that, honestly, what else could they have done? What other option would
YOU have proposed? Not take the liver transplant and just die?