The topic resists summary. Yes, bill will be scary if paying out of pocket. Health care is often tied to employment (you or spouse). There are different insu

The topic resists summary. Yes, bill will be scary if paying out of pocket. Health care is often tied to employment (you or spouse). There are different insurance options, even when employed. A good plan will cover everything but a relatively small fixed amount of even large bills (e.g., emergency delivery of child). A bad plan will have a lot of excluded procedures or very large "co-pays" where insurance pays some, you pay some. Other plans have mixes of the above approaches. If you have a professional job, your plan will typically be pretty good; if not, there can be problems. To pay for the co-pays, a system of tax-free health care saving accounts (HCSA) was set up. You pay into the HCSA, and the co-pays come out of that, and it's tax-free up to a point. So you notice there is this piecemeal and patch-atop-patch theme to the whole thing. When you get older, typically 65, there is a government health pool called Medicare that you can enroll in, that takes over most of the role of employer-provided insurance. Most older people do this. Then, you can get further insurance on top of that to plug holes it may have. Also, there is a very lucrative prescription drug plan that's now built in to Medicare, thanks to big pharma. A lot of doctors really don't like the insurance companies controlling whether procedures are considered acceptable. But, historically, the American Medical Association, the US physician's professional organization, has lobbied hard against public health plans. Finally, this is just one citizen's description of some of the major features of this so-called "system". There are a lot of other parts to the puzzle -- for instance, it varies by state, and there are 50 states -- and there are special cases, like veterans. It's wacko.