Tell me about it (I live in California). Not only that, you have to wait a ridiculous amount of time in the emergency room. With budget issues and cuts, maybe even longer. I was in the emergency room a few years ago, in late 2004. I was bleeding to death, and I had to wait nearly three hours.

Just in the news today a woman collapsed in a psychiatric ward dead after waiting hours for treatment. And they just left her there on the floor for some time and no one helped.

Lack of and cost of health care isn't the biggest problem, but the incompetence of the health care system.  Patients being dumped on the streets (or "skid-row"), giving wrong dosages of medication, using too powerful medicine for kids, mixing up medication, unsanitary conditions which spread bacterial disease and infections,  and a whole string of other mishaps and malpractices.

The US has a very high cost of health care compared to most other countries. This report would indicate that in this case you are not necessarily getting quality for money. (Though I might add that some of the news reports appearing in New Zealand news items about health care here, that things are probably not any better here).

This mandatory disclosure law is certainly a step in the right direction, but should exist in every state.  It is a tragedy that seeking health care is a high risk behavior.  The general public and and health care providers are largely in denial of the alarming frequency of medical errors that cause significant harm to patients.  One area of increasing concern is HAIs (healthcare associated infections).  Look at the reports of large outbreaks of bloodborne infections (hepatitis) due to unsafe injection practices (Nebraska, New York, Michigan, Nevada) that continue to occur across the country, despite longstanding guidelines that, if followed, would prevent all of them.  But what about the infections that occur one or two at a time?  These just seem to go unrecognized.  The scope of these HAIs is not yet well understood.  The CDC is concerned, yet lacks the necessary funding to adequately address this. Lack of awareness of these guidelines and failure to adhere to them are highly prevalent.  What will it take for us to learn from our errors?
Hepatitis C is the most common bloodborne viral infection, four times as common as HIV.  Historically, the most common means of transmission were in injection drug users and blood transfusions before screening started in 1992.  Currently, it is evident that a large percentage, if not the majority, of infections are transmitted at the time of healthcare procedures, often minor.
See this website about a grassroots effort to address the bloodborne healthcare associated infections: 
http://honoreform.org/