Imagine someone gets infected by a borderline patient before they are quarantined, like the nurse. Imagine this person is an undocumented worker or poor individual who eventually gets sick and is afraid or unable to afford healthcare and infects those around them. At this point you have a real problem as people are walking around unknowingly infecting others who also eventually either find a doctor who is unprepared for patients walking in with Ebola, or hopefully a hospital that is ready. I don't find this scenario unlikely at all. In the US there is limited legal means to force quarantines on large masses of people much less any place to put them. Imagine one going to an NFL football game. How do you trace 60,000 people and all their contacts?
Hopefully none of the exposed people will fit this scenario but you only need one free infectious person you don't know about.
How does the US health care system adapt if this does become widespread? Do people without health insurance receive 100% free treatment? Seems like the smart thing to do for everyone but the US health care system isn't exactly smart.
For acute treatment of things like this the US health care system is "smart". If you present with stuff like this to an ER they take care of you, otherwise you, not to mention the whole world, would hear of people being dumped in alleys or hospices. That's been the law since after WWII BTW.
Kudos to you, this outbreak is showing that very few assumptions should be made.
Heck, I keep reading such crazy, Onion level stuff in the "right wing" alternative media sources I follow that I've been going to the primary sources to confirm that "yes, the CDC director really said that". Not that I really distrust those sources, aside from Drudge, which gets a little too enthusiastic with their summary headlines. It's just the "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof". Which is seldom lacking.
On the "right wing" side I've caught only one case where my reading of the NIH historical budget charts didn't match the text claims (http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/a-word-on-the-...): After a steady, overall near doubling in constant dollars from FY94 to FY03, extra steep after 9/11, it's been in a slow and moderate constant dollar decline except for some big dollops from the stimulus bill, but it's not gone much below its FY01 level as of now, and its 70% above the FY94 level (again, in constant dollars). See http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43341.pdf
Which make that NIH guy;s "we would have an Ebola vaccine today if not for the eeeeevil Republicans" a clear lie. The NIH's remit is genuinely and legitimately very very broad, whereas the CDC's shouldn't be, it's all a matter of priorities, and even to this day, real work on Ebola is not a priority. Or perhaps I should put it this way, per robomartin's long essay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8463558 a number of people have some explaining to do.
Hopefully none of the exposed people will fit this scenario but you only need one free infectious person you don't know about.