One of the hospitals we had a child at had income based repayment and it was a sliding scale all the way up to 100-something thousand dollars per year of income

One of the hospitals we had a child at had income based repayment and it was a sliding scale all the way up to 100-something thousand dollars per year of income. At the lower end of the scale, they cut your bill to a small fraction of the original bill. I'm actually surprised this doesn't come up more in discussions about the cost of healthcare. We were actually uninsured when we had our first child right around the time the ACA came into existence, and my wife had an epidural so it was about as expensive as a birth could be without a C-Section, and after the income based adjustment the bill went from something like $30,000 to only a couple thousand dollars I believe and they also offered a 12 month interest free payment plan. It was definitely not a side of the industry that I had ever heard about.