I am not from the US. Had my close relative fight with cancer. If not for the government which sponsored it almost fully, excluding a couple of procedures like PET, it would cost our family a lot. Just for the scale: pial for one infusion of one out of three drugs would cost us $8k and my relative would’ve needed 16 infusions.
In financial terms, for most people the government doesn’t help you at all[1]. Either your private health insurance pays some of the costs, or else you pay completely out of pocket. Even if you do have health insurance, it’s still going to cost you several thousand dollars per year until it’s resolved. It’s quite common for cancer to cause people to go bankrupt even with good health insurance.
If you’re 1) old or 2) through means testing are found to be both poor and physically unable to work, then you get government-funded a health insurance plan. You still might go bankrupt though, just as with private health insurance. ↩︎
And after I go bankrupt, my children go broke, could I receive the governmental treatment for remission?