Part of the reason I believe people think they won't be treated is because that is very much the perception given to them by the front office staff of most hospitals and clinics. I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to when you say "the fault of a healthcare system that sends all the wrong signals", but I hope it is, and I feel it deserves a stronger highlight as the root of the problem.
The gentleman up-thread mentioned that when he went to visit his mother in ICU, he had to actively dodge the front desk person who wanted to discuss payment with him rather than letting him spend the last few minutes of his mother's life in her presence.
In the 90s, when I drove myself to the hospital suffering from appendicitis and I collapsed in the ambulance driveway trying to walk into the ER, since I was still lucid, albeit in pain, they felt it was more important to wheel me in to the billing booth and secure payment by taking all my available credit card information than to send me straight back to the examination room. They sounded quite pleasant and convincing that they were doing everything they could to get me seen right away, and they were very helpful in that they could just take the cards and write down the information after I was sent back, I just had to scrawl my signature on the release forms to get it started. It took me a decade to pay off that debt while avoiding bankruptcy and almost another decade to get my credit rating back up to a level that I could apply for some small bit of credit without fear of getting nasty looks from the person processing the application as a deadbeat.
While rationally, anyone would agree that either outcome is better than dying young, our society has become twisted in on itself in such a way that it is very easy to miss being rational when looking at the huge inconvenience and stress involved in incurring that cost versus the irrational hope that it is something small and it will pass on its own.
The gentleman up-thread mentioned that when he went to visit his mother in ICU, he had to actively dodge the front desk person who wanted to discuss payment with him rather than letting him spend the last few minutes of his mother's life in her presence.
In the 90s, when I drove myself to the hospital suffering from appendicitis and I collapsed in the ambulance driveway trying to walk into the ER, since I was still lucid, albeit in pain, they felt it was more important to wheel me in to the billing booth and secure payment by taking all my available credit card information than to send me straight back to the examination room. They sounded quite pleasant and convincing that they were doing everything they could to get me seen right away, and they were very helpful in that they could just take the cards and write down the information after I was sent back, I just had to scrawl my signature on the release forms to get it started. It took me a decade to pay off that debt while avoiding bankruptcy and almost another decade to get my credit rating back up to a level that I could apply for some small bit of credit without fear of getting nasty looks from the person processing the application as a deadbeat.
While rationally, anyone would agree that either outcome is better than dying young, our society has become twisted in on itself in such a way that it is very easy to miss being rational when looking at the huge inconvenience and stress involved in incurring that cost versus the irrational hope that it is something small and it will pass on its own.