How do you pay for emergency medical care when traveling abroad ?

People underestimate really serious dental pain... at various points in time over the last 5 decades I've broken ribs, a shoulder, fingers, toes, cracked my sternum, had kidney stones (female friends that have experienced both assure me that kidney stones are worse than childbirth), fractured my spine, been stabbed in the face, had a duodenal ulcer oerforate, and torn a pretty good chunk of my scalp off - and I *still* say that a really bad abscess when my wisdom teeth came through *very* late and got impacted against the roots of the teeth next to them, is the worst pain I've ever experienced. SO bad that, though technically conscious, I'd lost all ability to function - was unable to stand or control my movement, couldn't communicate meaningfully (people were talking to me, but it was like it was in a foreign language, I just couldn't make any sense of what they were saying), pretty sure you could have picked one of my kids up and walked off with them and I'd have been powerless to stop you. It really made me think about paid healthcare (my wife at the time was American, though fortunately we were living in London), as if you'd waved a syringe of morphine in front of me and told me you could make it stop if I just signed my house over to you, I really think I'd have done it. Beyond a certain level of pain you just regress back to basic, instinctual, animal level - I can totally understand now how wolves and bob cats bite their own leg off to get out of the jaws if a trap