Well, it's beside the point. For now, medical care costs money, and people rely on that money for their livelihood, and simply walking away from that debt is wrong.
The cost of medical care in the US is structured to account for bankruptcies - the hospitals get paid in aggregate. The real suckers here are people who actually pay for the care, because they've now paid several multiples of the real cost of the care to account for the people who couldn't afford this ridiculous number and went bankrupt.
The morality behind medical finance in the US is not nearly as clear cut as you think it is.
> "Well, it's beside the point."
It really isn't. It comes down to the core of the issue.
What we have is an industry that collectively charges many times the actual cost of delivering their service and have a monopoly on performing a critical service (licensing, certification). Whether or not this is acceptable hinges hugely on whether or not you believe access to this service is a fundamental right.
There is no way, for example, that we would accept a similar situation if the product in question was fresh water or air.
This is a vast oversimplification of a very complicated problem.
The common public loves to simplify problems, as it makes things easier to comprehend. I think this leads us to this huge partisan gaps in beliefs in this country. Both sides are guilty of boiling down complex problems to a level where people think they "understand" the problem. Unfortunately, there are many more actors, causes, and effect behind the scenes that must be accounted for. It's not a simple cause and effect, Doctors must get paid, argument.
Sure, I'm with you on this, but not everyone agrees, so you can argue with some people about this stuff until you are blue in the face, and never get anywhere, because you are operating on different assumptions. That's my point here.
