Wait until you have dependents to care for - then suddenly the choice is between paying for your medical care and feeding your family.

That choice doesn't match my understanding of how the bankruptcy system works.

Look at it from the point-of-view of poor people. If you're really poor, you might depend on acrobatic credit-card usage & cash-advance agencies to barely hold together a paycheck-to-paycheck life. If one of your children gets sick and the medical-cost ruin you. Your credit-cards stop working or get some insane interest-rate. Now you're in a situation that makes you wonder how your family is gonna eat this month or if you'll end up homeless within 3 months of not paying rent. BTW, this is the kind of situation I _hope_ Obamacare can prevent, but that's a whole separate discussion....

The main way that the ACA prevents it is (well, except in the states that elected not to take the almost-entirely-federally-funded-forever expansion of Medicaid) is by expanding Medicaid eligibility criteria so that quite a lot more of the even moderately poor are covered by Medicaid.

While, in the sense of being part of the ACA this is part of "ObamaCare", its not part of the regulations and mandate for private insurance that most discussion of ObamaCare focusses on.

Don't worry, the bankruptcy system will catch up and find a way to make medical debts non-discharge-able just like it did for student debts.

> Don't worry, the bankruptcy system will catch up and find a way to make medical debts non-discharge-able just like it did for student debts.

Inheritable, too, what with all the old people dying with medical debts their whole estate can't cover.

(The way it works now is this: When someone dies, their estate is responsible for paying their debts. Once their estate is gone, however, that's it. The creditors can try to convince the heirs to pay the debts, but they have no legal leverage to force them to. Lying about having such leverage is apparently fair game, however.)

This is why I simply will never inherit my parents estate when they die, I don't want to risk inheriting their debts no matter what I'm told. My mother inherited her fathers estate with all of her brothers and sisters only to find out that because Grandpa had a huge expensive operation that the estate actually owed money. Luckily she was able to somehow get her name off of the inheritance after the fact.

> I don't want to risk inheriting their debts

You can't. Once the estate's gone, the creditors can pound sand because the person they contracted with is gone and all their assets are gone, too. They can't come after anyone else.

> Luckily she was able to somehow get her name off of the inheritance after the fact.

I seriously doubt this is possible even in theory.

> their estate is responsible for paying their debts.

so why couldn't they just transfer all assets from their estate prior to dying? meaning, if you were about to die, there is never any need to pay down any debt, despite having the assets to cover it - it is better to give it away to charity or children/relatives imho.

Not if you have kids and your life insurance is better than your health insurance.

Comparing paying for health care to dying in a developed country in the year 2013 is a disgrace. It sounds like you're talking about an undeveloped hell-hole.

On questions like this I find it easier to not think about 2013 but to think about 1913 and 2113.

Compared to 1913 this situation is fantastic. All you have but you get to live.

Compared to what we should aspire to for 2113, I agree that it is barbaric.

That's extremely non productive, as you're basically saying it's good enough, and it's going to get better.

For 2013, in every single developed country bar one the situation would be called barbaric.

That is not good enough.