@R00T do a quick quote online and you will find that travel insurance is very cheap, my travel insurance to the states cost less than 70 us dollars. The extra cost he might have paid on top of say like a basic x amount of dollars for hospital stays and costs, a premium for options like ski accidents or hiking that they exclude from basic plans due to the blow out of treatment costs from those kinds of accidents (or deaths, body and funeral costs etc).
One quote for 3 weeks in Portugal with top coverage came out to 120 usd on my end so yeah, he had insurance.