Most hospitals have a charity fund. It is based on my income. If I am broke and make crap wages, my share might be reduced to 0 usd.

Currently working through this with the local hospital and about $8k of various visits over the last 4 years of so while we had some mix of no insurance, garbage insurance and Medicaid (federally funded low income insurance) and it's literally all being wiped away. The lady who processes the applications explained to me that it's on a sliding scale, so if you make $1 over the threshhold for 100% waiver, it might be a 95% waiver. Notably some of the debt turned out to be a billing error where they should have billed Medicaid in the first place, but that was one of the smaller bills in the pile of debt