[Publius6961]

Actually, the government is requiring that hospitals provide excellent medical care at great cost to the hospitals.

Wrong!
At great cost to other patients who can either pay or have medical insurance that they help pay for at a significant rate.

On New years day I spent a total of 6 hours in the waiting room and two hours in the emergency treatment section, had two x-rays and one MRI, and spent 2 hours hooked up to monitoring equipment, and was spoken to for 5 minutes at a time by three different doctors (shift change).
By mistake they lost my health insurance information and sent me a bill: total $6000 +

No way anybody can convince me that I got that amount of treatment.

[omegatoo]

OK, at great cost to hospitals who pass that cost on to other patients, thus raising the cost of health care. If the hospital hadn't sent the bill to you instead of your insurance co., odds are you would not have noticed the high costs. The hospital bills $6000 for the care, but probably gives a discount to the insurance co. Medicare and medicaid decide what they think each part of the care is worth, and pays only a fraction of that to the hospital, causing many hospitals to actually lose money when they treat medicaid or medicare patients. Many ER patients have no insurance at all, but if they come in with the same complaint that you did, they must get exactly the same care as you did, including the MRI, or the hospital can be fined and lose government funding.

As more people "choose" not to be insured and not to pay their bills (no not all uninsured don't pay) the hospitals raise the amount they bill so that the insurance companies basically take up the slack.

The paying uninsured are the only ones who don't have the leverage to pay less than the highest costs.

O2