My philosophy is to give freely without payment or obligation and to receive only what is freely given or thrown away. If it is not freely given, I do not want it, and I am not meant to have it. The same applies to healthcare, as any goods or services.
If I or anybody else need help and fellow humans are around to freely help us, then we are meant to be helped. If a doctor or anybody freely offers me assistance, then I will take it. If nobody can freely offer help, then so be it. That's natural selection. Natural selection is going to eventually select every single one of us physical creatures, without exception, for death. Natural selection is the Mind of God. Natural selection formed us, evolved us, from the dust of the earth, and continues to do so. And Natural Selection will without doubt also knock us off. Natural Selection giveth and Natural Selection taketh away. If we avoid natural selection, we stop evolving. If I am way out in the wilderness and break a leg and die, what's the big deal? If I don't die and heal or find help, good! People and creatures have been getting sick and healing and in the end all getting sick and dying for billions of years and will continue to do so. Why now is it such a drama? Will getting tubes stuck in you in a hospital and maybe avoiding inevitable Natural Selection for a couple more years lessen the drama?
I compromised a few years ago:
I did have a kind of exception, a kind of compromise in my path, a few years ago. I was at my brother's house remodeling a tool shelf. I tried to unscrew a baby-food jar (full of nuts and bolts) and it collapsed and shattered in my hand, making a two inch gash in my thumb, cut right to the bone. I wanted to simply clean it, put butterfly bandages on it, wrap it up, and let it be. But my sister-in-law was worried I might have cut a tendon or nerve, and kept insisting on taking me to the emergency room at the Lutheran Hospital in Denver. I finally gave in and let her take me there, though my heart was telling me not to go.
In the emergency room, they put brand new booties on my feet (without asking me) to keep my feet warm on the cold floor. Then an orderly rolled me to a room on a wheeled cot. All this surprised me, since I was fully capable of walking. In that room, several nurses looked at my thumb at different times, then told me they were going to roll me into the X-Ray room, to see if the wound might have broken glass in it. Then they rolled me back to the other room, where a nurse washed out the wound and told me to wait for the doctor. He finally came and stitched the wound. The nurses bandaged it and then placed a fancy net on it. Besides several hours of waiting, they did not more than 15 minutes work on my wound. They then sent me to billing. Since I had no insurance, they told me I had the option of applying for assistance, and that if I declared myself indigent I could have had the bill taken care of. But I told them I would accept the bill, to mail it to me in Moab, Utah.
The bill arrived in Moab, turning out to be about $1000! In addition to the stitches, they had charged me an exhorbitant price for the booties, the cart ride, and the X-Ray, all of which were deceptively pushed onto me. So how did I take care of the bill?
I was volunteering at the women's shelter (where I used to be a paid employee), and asked them to put me on the payroll again, but not to give the money to me, but have it sent directly to the hospital. A month's wages at the women's shelter is about $1000. After nearly $400 got paid to the hospital, I decided to write the hospital a letter. I decided to tell them my circumstances, that I didn't take money, and that I was signing all the shelter paychecks over to them, and that I did not want taxpayer money to foot the bill. But I did tell them that if they thought it ethical for me to pay one month's wages for fifteen minutes hospital work, then to keep billing me, and I would make sure it would be paid. I had been having mail sent to my friend's house, and found out she was throwing the bills away, thinking she was doing me a favor. So I called the hospital and asked them to send the bills to another address. The clerk then looked for my records and then told me, "Our records show your bill is already paid."
If I had it to do over again, I would have taken care of the wound myself. In the case I would have severed a nerve or tendon (which I did not), I would rather have that as my accepted karma than to play those games again. If it were meant for me to have care from a nurse or medical doctor, I would prefer one volunteer their services to me without pay, independent of a corporation. Otherwise, I'd rather have a bum thumb.
Please see # 9. What will you do when you get old?