QUOTE: Yes.  There's no way to recoup.

Yeah there is.  They'll get a judgement against you and garnish your wages.

I'm pretty sure that Hospital and Doctors (esp. in larger practices or organizations) routinely utilize collections agencies and lawyers to get their money.  My father-in-law is still paying some the costs of my mother-in-law's cancer care, and she passed away in 2003. 

The hospitals and physicians frequently eat these charges.

Yes.  There's no way to recoup.

*************

No they don't. They pass them on to insurance companies by charging someone who has insurance $8.00 for a Tylenol.

"They'll get a judgement against you and garnish your wages."

What do you get when you sue someone that has little or no assets?  It would cost the hospital/doctor more in legal costs than the average bill would cost.

All the pension plans, 401ks, etc. would be decimated.  So it's okay, to you, for the government to destroy the retirement funds of the poor and middle class?  The rich would shrug it off, take a deduction and make more money.  The poor and middle class couldn't do that."

Ah, so you're saying that no matter how costly, inefficient and detrimental to the health of the citizenry, the private health insurance industry must be sustained so that its investors may continue to profit by providing an inferior service at the potential cost of human lives?

See what I did there? I contrasted the loss of pensions with the loss of human lives.

Except that humans lives aren't being lost.  Hospitals don't turn away people that don't have insurance.  Emergency rooms are full of them.

This alone would make it virtually impossible for pharmaceutical companies to simply stop selling their products in regulated countries -- other countries wouldn't let U.S.-based drug companies get away with simply NOT supplying approved drugs.

No company is forced to sell to any specific country for any product.  If the drug companies were to set a price at X then the price should be X.  They would make it openly available to any country that wished to purchase it.  If the country has regulations that prevent the purchase at price X, then the regulation needs to change, not the price.

I'm against extending the patents since that would extend the time until a generic version was available. 

QUOTE: What do you get when you sue someone that has little or no assets?

Not being a hospital or a lawyer I'm not sure.  I would assume that either like I said they'd garnish your wages and just wait for the money to come in that way (and I think lawyer's fees MIGHT be part of the judgement, but I could be wrong, I don't know).  That, or in those cases maybe they'd write it off.  I was responding to the notion that, "The hospitals and physicians frequently eat these charges."  Which I'm pretty sure is not the case, but would love to be proven wrong.

Edited to add: Lawyers' Fees

Change You Can Believe In

LOL.  When I saw the Embrace Change Secret Invasion commerical as I was watching it as was expecting to hear Obama's voice at the end saying, "This message was appproved by Barack Obama"

Really?  Hospitals and physicians frequently eat thousands of dollars in charges?

Yep.  That's where I was talking earlier about having an insured rate and a non-insured rate.  In the example where it was $600 and then they changed it to only $170 since there was no insurance.   The insurance company likely would have only paid $170 so that's what they charge the uninsured person.  They can't bill the insurance company just $170 or they would likely only get around $45.

That's extremely common practice.

"Except that humans lives aren't being lost.  Hospitals don't turn away people that don't have insurance.  Emergency rooms are full of them."

Half-truth.

Financial obstacles to health care keep people from getting check-ups when they notice early symptoms of disease. It also prevents them from getting regular check-ups. All sorts of preventative measures are prioritized away because people can't afford them under the current system.

When they get to the emergency room it's too late. People die of treatable diseases because the symptoms at the treatable stage do not seem severe enough to justify the high cost of a non-emergency consultation.

An emergency room shouldn't be anybody's primary health care option, yet for many it is.