States that opted into the ACA Medicaid Expansion and generally fund hospitals have great emergency care for poor people. There's a kind of missing middle where once you're above the income threshold for Medicaid but aren't working for a job that's willing to fund an extremely good health plan you have to deal with all sorts of deductibles and prior authorizations and stuff. Plus, non-emergency care, especially from specialists, has gotten longer and longer wait times unless you're lucky enough to live in a region with mostly healthy people that also aren't the "worried well."
Tl;dr, it's incredibly patchwork, and everyone's experience is going to vary depending on their state's individual social safety net, the overall health of their local population, the particular insurance network and hospital network they have access to, and their individual income.
Also, the US has a federal law that no hospital that accepts Medicare patients is allowed to deny care in the case of an emergency based on someone's ability to pay. That means that a lot of very poor people will get incredibly expensive emergency care for free, while not being able to afford the basic preventative care that would keep them out of a state of medical emergency. That isn't really the hallmark of a particularly functional system.
States that opted into the ACA Medicaid Expansion and generally fund hospitals have great emergency care for poor people. There's a kind of missing middle where once you're above the income threshold for Medicaid but aren't working for a job that's willing to fund an extremely good health plan you have to deal with all sorts of deductibles and prior authorizations and stuff. Plus, non-emergency care, especially from specialists, has gotten longer and longer wait times unless you're lucky enough to live in a region with mostly healthy people that also aren't the "worried well."
Tl;dr, it's incredibly patchwork, and everyone's experience is going to vary depending on their state's individual social safety net, the overall health of their local population, the particular insurance network and hospital network they have access to, and their individual income.
Also, the US has a federal law that no hospital that accepts Medicare patients is allowed to deny care in the case of an emergency based on someone's ability to pay. That means that a lot of very poor people will get incredibly expensive emergency care for free, while not being able to afford the basic preventative care that would keep them out of a state of medical emergency. That isn't really the hallmark of a particularly functional system.