But getting things done without health insurance is a giant pain in the ass. When I was living in Japan I was able to get care for most things (people there go to the hospital for a cold, culture shock) for a relatively small co-pay on the national health plan which I had signed up for/paid into. When I broke a bone in my hand in the U.S. during a stint of unemployment, I went to a clinic, who said it's probably broken but we need x-rays. X-rays are hundreds of dollars without insurance, insurance I would have had if I was in full-time employment at the time, but since I wasn't I had no insurance and had no way to pay for the series of x-rays. I ended up splinting it myself, and going to a different clinic and complaining about a toothache in order to get prescribed painkillers (went in looking for prescription-strength naproxen to deal with the swelling, ended up getting that and vicodin, which was a sweet ride let me tell you)

In short: prescription drugs from Costco are cheap, but real healthcare is unreachably expensive for the uninsured, unless your credit is already wrecked in which case do what you want and just claim you can't pay the bill (hey it's how this shit got so expensive in the first place)

-nZero