So Ambers financial history would disqualify her for any charity aid available - There is no way she has enough money in the bank to cover the costs of her treatment. She will have to wait until November(?) to get health insurance (I am in the UK and I am not sure how it works) - I am going to assume her insurance rate will be astronomical and any payout she has to make will be huge too.
Will America to leave her to die if she can't afford to pay - Are cancer victims who can't pay for treatmen really just left to die in pain?
I was looking at Kentucky's medicaid site when there was speculation about either Norma's insurance status or Becky's medicaid status. IIRC, they have a 5 year look-back period. So even if amber tanks her channel now, she's not going to be able to get medicaid. I think the earnings limit for single people is around 1,500 a month give or take a few hundred.
Before obamacare, if you didn't have insurance through a large group employer (like if you got insurance from your employer who only had 20 employees, it would be no better than individual insurance), you had to get individual insurance. They charged huge premiums, would not cover preexisting conditions and had limits on what they would cover, and when (there were law suits where an insurance company wouldn't pay for a middle aged person's liver cancer because they took acne medication as a teen and didn't disclose it). Not to mention, there was an extra charge for being a woman of childbearing age. So you could be paying 350 a month with a 5k deductible, and a plan that wouldn't cover anything you'd likely need it for. If you had allergies or asthma, if you were put in the hospital for pneumonia, or had lung cancer, oh well, they weren't covering it. Insurance through a large employer didn't have these restrictions because the plan was large enough that 100 healthy people would mitigate the insurers risk on 10 really unhealthy people. That's a random statistic I just made up, just an example.
So Obamacare put laws in place that got rid of the preexisting conditions clauses and made it affordable for individuals to be insured. Not everyone gets insurance through work, and not all work plans are large enough to be affordable. So to get insurance under a plan that follows obamacare regulations, you have to sign up during the open enrollment period which is november-december. If you have a major event like job loss or moving out of state, then it would open back up for you for a period. If you don't sign up during that time, your only option is short term insurance, which is for 364 days or less, and the obamacare rules don't apply to those plans, so it would be like the old style of individual insurance. So that's the reason we keep talking about november.
Without insurance, america will definitely let you die. In fact, even if you have insurance, but you've racked up high bills through co-insurance (usually there's a limit to what the insurance will pay, like 80-90% but 10-20% of hundreds of thousands is still a lot of money to come up with) and you can't afford more treatment, yes, they will let you die.
In America, in order to survive a medical catastrophe or an expensive, chronic medical condition, you either have to be poor (to get medicaid) or rich (to afford co-pays and co-insurance on top of monthly premiums). If you don't fall into either of those categories, you either need to have a very large and generous network (like a church that will hold a pancake breakfast or spaghetti dinner or whatever they do to raise funds, or lots of people donating to a GFM), or you will die.
That's the healthcare reality in America.
As for what Amber will have to pay for insurance, I have no idea. There are all sorts of factors that influence the premiums. Also, I think there might be only 2 insurance choices in Kentucky, less choice means costlier insurance.
