Every hospital encounter my wife and I have ever had involved a request by a clerk for health insurance info. That said, I worked in EMS for over 20 years and have never seen a patient denied treatment regardless of insurance coverage. Asking for the info has no impact on whether you are treated nor the quality of care. Clerks do "clerk stuff" and "providers do health care". Never heard an ER doc asking a patient about health care coverage....they just dive in and do their job and let the bean counters worry about how they will get paid.

Any decent hospital has trained triage RN's who are skilled at tackling the work load. We don't ask for an insurance card when a serious case comes in. If you are ambulatory then, yes, you will check in with the unit secretary who starts you into the process and part of that is a scan of your card (if not already on file). But we must treat regardless.

Even in my physicians only practice we won't turn away a walk-in even though we are supposed to treat only known registered patients. I've never had a provider say no when asked to treat pro-bono.