Every friend of mine who has worked in a hospital or spent a great deal of time in one (e.g., had a baby who spent the first year of its life in NIC/ICU) has told me it's a canard that ANYONE ever gets turned away from a hospital. People without insurance, poor, legal or illegal, all get admitted and taken care of for EVERY possible ailment. They may get transferred to other hospitals, depending on their needs, but they are NEVER tossed out on the streets. If they have cancer, they are treated; if they need surgery for anything, they are treated. A very small percentage of them eventually may receive bills for 100k...but who cares? The hospitals know they will never see a dime, and, except for patients who are middle class people with excellent credit, the collection agencies the hospitals may sell some of their debts to won't bother to go after them. And even in the small number of cases where middle class people who had no insurance and qualified for no state or local aid programs and have good credit and are chased by collection agencies...those collection agencies happily would settle for 30% of what you owe...then 20%...then 10%...keep bargaining. And if you don't even want to pay that, your chances of getting sued are very low. And if you DO get sued and file a simple response that you don't have sufficient knowledge to answer the questions without a hearing, the chances that the agency will bother proceeding to a trial are nearly zero. (But do NOT ignore a lawsuit; do file a response, or the collection agency could get a default judgment against you.)
Bottom line: what you see on Primetime TV — children with broken arms turned away from ERs because their parents don't have insurance or because they are illegal aliens — NEVER happens. It's baloney.