clipped from: www.nytimes.com   

Perhaps you’ve seen those television commercials denouncing health care reform as a plot to create a Canadian-style totalitarian nightmare, and you feel a wee bit scared.

Then one day two years ago, Ms. Tucker was working on her office computer when she noticed that she was having trouble typing with her right hand.

A colleague called 911, and an ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital.

“An emergency room doctor met me at the door, and they took me straight upstairs to the CT scan,” she recalled. A neurologist explained that she had suffered a stroke.

“They never spoke to me about money,”
Then, last year, Ms. Tucker fainted while on a visit to San Francisco, and an ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital. But this was in the United States
“The first person I saw was a lady with a computer,” she said, “asking me how I intended to pay the bill.”

Nothing was seriously wrong, and the hospital discharged her after five hours. The bill came to $8,789.29.