One of my best friends, going back to 6th grade, died in April.

He worked as a heavy-equipment mechanic, even as he soldiered through many rounds of exhausting chemotherapy treatments. He remained incredibly strong and fit, mentally and physically. Throughout most of this ordeal, he looked and sounded like he would beat the odds, but he didn’t.

His wife and three school-aged children started packing after his funeral. A long battle with cancer had eaten away their savings. Their home had been foreclosed. They would soon be evicted.

They had medical insurance. They had worked hard all their lives. Friends, family, and co-workers sent them checks and put on a fundraiser, raising tens of thousands of dollars. It would never be enough to keep pace with the mounting medical bills that were not covered by insurance.

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Everyone either knows someone who died like this, or they will soon enough. The American Dream often comes to an abrupt end as soon as someone in the family gets cancer or has a heart attack. Obamacare may have put more Americans on the insurance rolls, but it has not changed this:

“The average American worker is one serious medical event away from financial hardship,” according to a study released Wednesday by Aflac AFL, +0.47%

Aflac’s 2014 Aflac WorkForces Report gathered responses from 1,856 company benefits decision-makers and 5,209 employees.

These are the lucky people in America who still have jobs and company-sponsored health-care plans. And here’s their outlook: 66% said they “wouldn’t be able to adjust to the large financial costs associated with a serious injury or illness.”

Most of them come to work with personal financial issues distracting their minds, according to the study, and medical expenses are often why. According to the survey:

• 53% would need to borrow from a 401(k) plan or tap a credit card to pay for unexpected, out-of-pocket medical expenses.

• 49% have less than $1,000 to pay for unexpected, out-of-pocket medical expenses.

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• 27% have less than $500 to pay for unexpected, out-of-pocket medical expenses.

• 13% have been contacted by a collection agency regarding unpaid medical bills.

• 10% said high medical costs have affected their credit scores.

These concerns persist despite out-of-pocket limits established by Obamacare.

The maximum out-of-pocket cost limit can be no more than $6,350 for an individual plan and $12,700 for a family plan in 2014, but this more than what many Americans are prepared to pay. The limit includes deductibles, coinsurance and copays, but it does not include the annual premiums or payments to out-of-network providers that people faced with a life-or-death situation may feel compelled to use.

Health-care insurance is not only inadequate to counter the risks for most working Americans, but the premiums keep rising. Premiums have risen 80% since 2003, according to The Kaiser Family Foundation. Inflation over that time has only risen 27%.

The Kaiser study notes premium increases have moderated, rising only 4% last year, but that’s still more than twice rate of inflation, and it may be because fewer people see medical professionals during recessions and anemic economic recoveries because they can’t even afford the co-pays.

Annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage hit $16,351 in 2013, and on average workers paid $4,565 of that amount, according to Kaiser. And for what? Plans that might let them go bankrupt or lose a home to foreclosure if they become seriously injured or ill?

It seems our health-care issues have been so politicized that no one can fix them.

Amid all the dysfunction, costs keep rising for a lot of reasons: Regulators, bureaucracy, technology, the aging baby boomers, the obesity crisis, drug and alcohol abuse, and, let’s not forget, corporate profiteering.

I imagine there was once a time when people actually wanted to heal the sick and comfort the dying. Now, it’s all about how much they can bill or how much they can limit care.

Just look at the recent earnings releases of health-care insurers Cigna Corp. CI, -0.63% WellPoint Inc. US:WLP and Aetna Inc. US:AET You don’t see them missing earnings expectations. They beat them handily — even under the expected strains of Obamacare.

Just look at the CEO pay.

Mark Bertolini, CEO at Aetna, got $30.7 million in total compensation last year. Cigna CEO David Cordani got. $17.76 million. Wellpoint CEO Joseph Swedish fell just a little short of $17 million, but he was only CEO for nine months of the year.

I don’t mean to pick on just these guys, because capitalizing on the sick and dying has become just another accepted part of the American Way across the entire health-care sector. CVS Caremark CVS, +1.98% CEO Larry Merlo got $22.9 million in compensation last year. Lamberto Andreotti at Bristol-Myers Squibb BMY, -0.21% got $20.8 million. George Chapman at Health Care REIT US:HCN , which does real-estate deals in the health-care sector, got $18.9 million.

Executives in health care, you see, try to contain the cost of everything, except themselves.

And whatever cuts they make are not aimed at making health care affordable, but rather, improving the profit margins. They’ve managed to stem the outrageous hikes we’ve seen in health-care costs just enough to keep the system from completely breaking.

The main reason it still works is because employers providing health benefits to their employees can still find ways to pass these rising costs onto their workers. Here’s how they are doing it, according to Aflac:

• 19% of companies moved away from traditional major medical insurance in 2013 and instead paired health-savings accounts with high-deductible health plans.

• 21% bumped full-time workers down to part-time so they wouldn’t have to provide benefits.

• 22% eliminated or reduced employee benefit offers.

• 32% eliminated or delayed raises.

• 39% hired independent contractors or consultants.

• 56% increased employees’ copayments and shares of premiums last year and 59% plan to do the same before the end of this year.

As long as there is still something more to extract from America’s middle class, the system still works.

My friend died at age 52 knowing that all he’d ever worked for was lost. He at least got to spend most of his final days in the familiar surroundings of his home. His wife somehow managed to hold off an impending eviction until his life came to its very expensive end.

“It is what it is,” he would say as he made peace with his fate.

The nation’s health-care system is still destroying America, one friend and one family at a time.

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