I'm sorry to hear about your friend.

To more completely answer Cris's question:

No healthcare provider is allowed to deny coverage for an emergency based on ability to pay. However, cancer does not qualify as an emergency.

Social Security Disability Insurance provides a base level of income to those who have a medical condition that effectively prevents them from working.

Medicare is a national health insurance provided to those over 65 and those who have significant illnesses. You have to have been on SSDI for two years before you qualify in that case, though.

Medicaid is a national health insurance program run by individual states that is intended to help those who are poor and have serious illnesses. (I think eligibility varies from state to state.) I imagine that this is where your friend got his coverage from, and quitting his job was probably a prerequisite for him to be eligible. (Not that I'd want to continue working, either.)

I don't mean to exploit your friend's illness, I merely use it as an example, and cancer is an insidious disease that can have no symptoms until it's too late, so this may not fit his situation, but if your friend had had health insurance and had regular checkups with the doctor, his cancer might have been detected when it was still treatable. It's this sort of thing that bothers me.

Few, if any, people are left to die on the streets, but people are left to become sick enough to die.

People would be up in arms if these programs were abolished, but the notion of extending them to more people sends them into apoplexy, and the proposal doesn't even go that far.