I cut open my finger. Bled profusely. Wrapped it up hoping it would stop. Checked it a few hours later and still bleeding. Decided to sleep on it. Woke up and still bleeding when the bandage came off. Went to the ER and was told they dont treat a cut if it's over 12hrs untreated because of possible infection that would fall on them if they were to touch it. So they gave me a bandaid. Month later got a bill for $500. For a fucken bandaid!

Had been to the doctor once in a 15 year span and for a check up. Go to an urgent care because I was in week 3 of nervous breakdown, had lost 20 pounds in 9 days and could no longer drink water without vomiting. The doctor told me "anxiety doesn't affect your stomach" and treated me like a rx seeking junkie and sent me on my way without so much as advising I call a crisis hotline. It took everything in me just to leave the house and make it there so I couldn't even express my shock. My insurance expired that day and I didn't know I'd be rejected by another nine doctors and psychiatrists or I might have just killed myself to make it stop. A friend with depression who was prescribed xanax she had no use for saved me and I self medicated for 6 weeks and carefully weaned off it to recover. Thanks US healthcare.

Going without a fairly important medication for over a year because my insurance company wouldn’t. Several appeals and back and forth between me, the doctor and the insurance company. Aetna’s customer support bureaucracy is more byzantine than anything I’ve ever seen. It was an unbelievably degrading and frustrating process.

I have known two separate people who both refused to marry the loves of their lives, not because of an aversion to commitment or anything like that, but because they knew they'd die first and they didn't want their loves to inherit their crushing medical debts. (One had terminal cancer, the other chronic heart problems.).

My boyfriend (36) needed an amputation because he had a blood and bone infection, the bone was softening up like a marshmallow. The doctor stressed how time sensitive it was to have it removed but in the next breath told us she wouldn't be able to perform the surgery if we didn't have 25% down. We spent 2 months of our rent money trying to get his surgery taken care of. She tried to reschedule when we were $100 short. Our insurance doesn't cover preexisting conditions, which they claimed his condition was.

I worked for one of the top four largest insurance companies in the US for a number of years. My department was outsourced and my team was let go. I was eventually hired back as a contracted worker and was denied health coverage by the same company I devoted so much time to. So yeah, our system is total s**t.

Got an absurd bill from our pediatrician. We have pretty good insurance so I called to see what was up. Turns out, or pediatrician was covered under our plan 100%, but the office where we saw him was not—so all the vaccines and materials from that visit (from the pharmacy of said office) were “out of network” so we were responsible for 100% of those.

The biggest kicker? Our pediatrician also practices out of a different clinic ACROSS THE STREET that would have been fully covered under our insurance plan. We just didn’t know at the time, and because there was a delay in billing we made another visit to the non-covered office before we found out.

The bill.