That $600 is just monopoly money to the majority of constituents, because they have insurance of some kind or they're on Medicare/Medicaid. So those people are

That $600 is just monopoly money to the majority of constituents, because they have insurance of some kind or they're on Medicare/Medicaid. So those people are usually, not always, but usually fine. And that of course is part of the problem. Medical billing is like playing numberwang or who's line is it anyway. No two numbers on a bill seem to be correlated in any way to another except as upper or lower bounds. When someone without coverage comes in then, they have to play that stupid game with all the numbers, and of course they either ignore it and go into debt, pay the cash price if they're able, or they manage to negotiate it down by orders of magnitude - proving the price didn't matter anyway.