He's probably not smart enough to realize that a sick person won't be turned away by the hospital, and that the care they receive will end up going into collections when they fail to pay. The people who pay for medical care at the hospital will end up eating the cost of people who can't afford it, regardless, and you get all the administrative costs associated with the collection effort as the cherry on top.

Hospitals can't leave a person with a bullet hole in their stomach to bleed out, but they are under no obligation to provide, for example, chemotherapy to a cancer patient, or a kidney transplant.

So, no, you can't just walk into a hospital and get the same care you would if you actually had insurance, and then just stiff them with the bill later.

Yes, you can, for many, many maladies.

People without insurance don't go to hospitals. They don't go to doctors for routine checkups. They don't go to doctors to deal with chronic conditions. They go to ERs because they can't afford healthcare, but they know that the hospitals can afford their emergencies.

Of course people without insurance go to ERs. That's not going to help you if you have, for example, Type 1 diabetes and need daily insulin and test strips. The ER isn't going to send you home with 1000 strips and a half dozen vials of humalog.

So the "solution" on offer for our "problem" of having to insure diabetes sufferers is that if you have Type 1 diabetes but don't have a nice job, you should just die quietly?

  the hospitals can afford their emergencies

No, it's because the ER is legally obligated to treat, regardless of ability to pay. ERs in urban areas are generally money losers.

For example, Kaiser's huge new Santa Clara (CA) complex kept its ER from opening until the very day they closed the ER at the prior site on Kiely. There are fewer ERs in the San Jose area than there were 200,000 people ago.

Yes, but the simple fact of the matter is that the hospital wouldn't be in business if they couldn't afford to provide the care. So the care is going to be administered ANYWAY, at a much greater cost than it should have been, because people wait until their problems blow up into emergencies before seeking care.