How cost shifting by hospitals is killing the middle class

Hospitals are like hotels, there is the rack price (retail price), which is paid by to the uninsured, wholesale price, which is paid by the insured , and the government price that is imposed on the hospital. The system is not too bad for the poor as they will not pay the bill anyway and there is no way to force them to. Those uninsured with some assets faced with these outrageous bills are forced into bankruptcy. One third of all individual bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. This system fails those with modest assets and no insurance.
Those with insurance pickup the tab for the uninsured who do not pay their bills and the underpayment by governments by increases in their health insurance premiums. The employees of small employers are forced to pay the price reductions in health insurance that the large employers by their bargaining leverage are able to extract from their insurers.
In an article, “Predatory Hospital Billing: Dynamic Cost Shifting to the Uninsured” Robert S. Walsh M.D. presents how the middle class is being killed by hospital billing practices:

“Over the past year, aggressive billing practices have been exposed at a number of hospitals in the United States. Despite the fact that a widower had paid $16,000 of his late wife's bill of $18,740, some 20 years after the incurrence of the bill a teaching hospital held a lien on his home for $40,000 in interest. Many years earlier the hospital had seized his bank account, and now the 77-year-old man was destitute. Only tremendous publicity caused the hospital to back down. That same week, another nonprofit teaching hospital reportedly drove a 25-year-old uninsured woman from New York City while dunning her for a $19,000 bill for a two-day stay for an appendectomy. In California, a patient was forced into bankruptcy in 2000 by a for-profit hospital from a day-and-a-half stay in the hospital that did not include any surgery but totaled $48,000 in hospital bills. These have become common stories as hospitals aggressively market, bill, collect, and foreclose, just like any other corporation. The uninsured are facing the brunt of the hospital industry's billing practices.”