When I had my heart surgery in April the guy in the bed next to me was a middle age homeless person who was getting his heart valve repaired. All at the expense of the government.
Cool. So nobody in the US actually needs insurance! Who knew?
A U.S. federal statute, the
Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (1986), requires hospitals to treat indigent patients
with serious medical conditions.
Many people in the United States who do not otherwise qualify for comprehensive government-funded medical care (unlike, for example, veterans, old people, and those whose incomes are below the poverty level in the state where they live) typically check into hospital emergency rooms when they have a medical problem.
The law has been controversial because it frequently is used to provide treatment for routine medical problems. One of the purposes of a subsequent federal statute,
the 2010 Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") was to provide a mechanism for those who could afford private medical insurance but previously could not qualify to purchase it—for example, because of existing conditions which insurance companies declined to cover—to acquire insurance coverage from government-operated marketplace "exchanges," thus relieving some of the economic pressure on hospitals to provide unreimbursed care to individuals who did not genuinely have a medical emergency.