Life sustaining you'll get for free by the hospital which merely raises everyone elses rates. We already have socialized medicine, its just the "wrong" middlemen are profiteering.
From personal experience via a friend with a broken arm, the hospital will eventually present you with the most amazing collection of bills you've ever seen with the most unimaginable rates, so a simple non-compound arm fracture and cast will end up billed as $50K. The goal of the hospital is to book as large of a paper loss as possible, so the paper loss will probably exceed actual service cost by a couple orders of magnitude. Somehow the ER doc who spent about 15 minutes verifying yes it is indeed broken will charge 6 hours of dedicated time, you'll be billed for entire jars of painkillers if they give you a single pill, etc. It'll take about six months for all the bills to arrive from all the doctors and the hospital, but bill collectors will start calling before the first bill arrives. Once you're sure you have all the bills, its bankruptcy time, which costs some time and money. So the real cost of any lifesaving medical procedure never exceeds maybe $2K to a lawyer, maybe less. She needed the car insurance money from the accident to get the car to continue to attend school and work, don't recall how she paid for the bankrupcty. Bankruptcy is actually pretty expensive and not surprisingly the sharks in the biz only take cash. The bankruptcy doesn't really matter, because part time no benefits minimum wage retail cashiers are not going to get mortgages and new car loans anyway. Legally officially it could be an issue for 7 years or whatever, in practice its not an issue after a couple years at most. I suppose if you had the misfortune to break your arm the week before graduation and you get a real job, you'd be out a substantial amount of money. It would be highly unwise to get married if you're poor, because if she was my wife at the time, I'd have had my financial life destroyed by her mere car accident and broken arm. At least that's how it was in the early 90s. Other than prices probably going up an order of magnitude or so, I suspect nothing has really changed.