What's Wrong with U.S. Health Care, Chapter 457

Here's a story out of California that illustrates how heartless and immoral profit-based health care can be. From the Sacramento Bee:
"A letter of sympathy should have arrived at the home of Gerald and Elizabeth Hawkins 10 days after their son Scott was beaten to death.
"Instead, UC Davis Medical Center officials were apologizing Tuesday to the Hawkins family over a clerical error that instead sent them a $29,000 bill and a form letter suggesting their slain son was medically indigent."

Is this just an anomaly? No. I've come across countless stories like this one -- stories in which patients in the United States are treated like customers rather than people with vital needs.
How many similar stories have I encountered from Canadian centres? Not even one. That's because we Canadians don't let greed run rampant through our hospital hallways. U.S. Americans could learn something from that.
Quoting the Bee again: "Hospital officials Tuesday continued to scrutinize how the error occurred ..."
Well, it never would have occurred if the U.S. health-care system didn't stink of avarice. It would never have occurred up here in Canada, where people can go to a hospital ER without fear of getting a bill for an amount large enough for a new car purchase.
The hospital apologized and said it'll try to make sure no other family goes through what the Hawkins family experienced, but really it's inevitable that slip-ups like this one will happen as long as it's "normal" for hospitals to charge people an arm and a leg for health care.
Hospital officials can never give a satisfactory answer to the question posed by Gerald Hawkins: "Why, in any civilized society, would a hospital send the parents of a murdered boy a bill and letter like this?"