I've heard that the event you're describing is just a few percent of total medical expenditures, and even if we could not collect on every single event you desc

I've heard that the event you're describing is just a few percent of total medical expenditures, and even if we could not collect on every single event you describe, it'd still be less than the loss rate in other industries, such as merchandising (where employees steal the stuff you're trying to sell). If that's true, why are we using this tiny loss-rate percentage in healthcare—when other industries handle double or triple the loss rate without any drama—as a primary argument for making dramatic changes to healthcare, or alternatively, as an argument against changes that would fix a whole bunch of other things, but not that, because they don't go far enough? Do we really need to solve that? It seems to me that we can actually just ignore the problem of emergency room situations—including non-payment—when discussing improvements to healthcare regulation in the US because it really doesn't matter. And since it doesn't matter, people should stop bringing it up as if it did. My $0.02 (assuming the percentage I've heard is accurate).