it does, however, not encourage people to engage in preventive health maintenance either. and if something serious happens to your health, suddenly you've got mountains of crippling debt (as you know, bob).

OMG YES....and actually, if you can't afford the preventive health maintenance, you are _more_ likely to wind up needing catastrophic care -- and then without the discounts provided by hospitals to people with insurance, the sickest people wind up owing the most money, which they can't pay, so their credit gets wrecked on top of it. And then usually they can't afford the preventive health maintenance even _more_ afterwards.

Such a horrible mess.