"YOU JUST GO TO AN EMERGENCY ROOM."
From researching the (often simply incompetent) provisions at the state level to keep the middle class from going into medical-related poverty, I am afraid I believe now that only Universal Coverage at the National Level would substantially solve the problem. (There are just too many ways for people to freeload on the rest of us otherwise. Often, the freeloading is involuntary -- good people not freeloading pay extra for health insurance to support the freeloaders, then they find that the insurance system that they thought protected them has left them without assets, and they have to start freeloading themselves.) Universal Coverage seems possible in a few years, but the country may blow it again -- and it may continue that only the very poor, the exceptionally well off, and the imprisoned can count on stable, reliable, continuous health insurance.
The recent George W. Bush advice, "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, YOU JUST GO TO AN EMERGENCY ROOM."* is not so hot if you are trying to have something left to lose. If you go to the emergency room, and/or the the hospital, they will track you down and make you pay. Until and unless you have nothing left to lose. That's the problem, the cluelessness, with the Medicaid- or Emergency-Room-Only safety-net system he is touting in the speech. (And let's not forget that those emergency room costs get cost-shifted to everyone with insurance, making their insurance unaffordable.)
*Yes, he really said that. Here at this transcript at the White House Site, paragraph 16, the one that starts with "The immediate goal...". The video of available on the top right of that page, and within the video, you can find the President saying that remark at timing 7:05 (i.e. seven minutes and five seconds in).
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