You really don't want to get sick anywhere. Serious medical conditions are expensive just about any place they don't have socialized medicine; and I'm not sure I'd want to go to places that are socialized.

In Mexico, they have some kind of socialized medicine (IMSS) but I've never been entirely clear on how it works. I don't think it's free for everyone, I think you have to pay into their social security system or something. But I never cared to know how it worked because most people that can afford it tend to get private insurance coverage in Mexico and go to private hospitals rather than rolling the dice with the socialized Mexican system. When my mother-in-law needed some surgery (and she didn't have medical insurance), we just pooled our money together and paid for private care.

As I said, my wife and I just moved back to the U.S. and obviously one of the first things on the agenda was health insurance. I was pleasantly surprised at how expensive it wasn't. With all the complaining people do, I was expecting much worse. In fact, our monthly bill isn't that much more than what we would have been paying for similar health insurance in Mexico.

In short, it's not so much you don't want to get sick in the U.S., it's that you don't want to get sick without insurance. And from what I've seen, that's not just in the United States.

Regards,
Craig Steiner