Unintended consequences of EMTALA

Edwin Leap: “EMTALA has created the very conditions it sought to avoid. Now, with specialists unavailable, hospitals full, transfers always difficult and no lack of genuinely sick and dying patients, there’s often 1) no one to care for them and 2) no place to put or send them. EMTALA, the federal mandate to save the poor from sickness has begun to crumble at its foundations, and leave untold numbers of patients, poor and paying, without care.”