Just like your phone bill is padded with charges supposedly "imposed" by the government, but which actually go to pay the bloated telecommunications bureaucracy. Sure, some of the charges do go toward passing along government taxes and fees, but "the government" is also a convenient bad guy to blame while you inflate those fees.
Now there is a problem with individual hospitals being burdened with the costs of individual patients that can't pay. I was under the impression this was a problem the Affordable Care Act was supposed to address: but perhaps you are from a state where your Governor screwed his constituents by refusing to sign on.
The underlying problem with health care is the same as with welfare: fragmentation and inequitable cost-sharing. One of the drivers of the problem is the schadenfreude invocation of State's rights. It's schadenfreude because the tacit political intent is to treat the problem "competitively", i.e. drive the people who "cost" more to another State. While States secretly play those games, real people suffer.
Some things just have to be done as a matter of national infrastructure so States won't busily try to offload problems onto each other. This is the problem with minimum wage. This is the problem with welfare. This is the problem with health care mentioned above. That hospital would not have a pretext to charge patients for "other patients" at that particular hospital if costs were spread more evenly.
If we have single-payer, we still have to deal with the ability people to pay into the system: that means dealing with unemployment and creating more ladders out of welfare and opening up opportunities for people with disabilities instead of creating this parallel world of SSI poverty.
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