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> Emergency rooms only have to stabilize you, they don't have to treat you. It's a big difference. No, and you don't want an emergency room treating you, becau

> Emergency rooms only have to stabilize you, they don't have to treat you. It's a big difference. No, and you don't want an emergency room treating you, because emergency physicians aren't trained to provide anything other than acute care. That said, the point is moot, because once a patient is stabilized, if they need further care, they'll be admitted, and receive care from an internist. Afterwards, they'll receive a bill for a rather large amount, which the hospital doesn't expect them to actually pay (but for legal reasons is required to present them with). If they know about this, the uninsured patient can almost always get away with paying less than 5-10% of the total (initial) bill, and the hospital writes off the remainder so the bill is paid in full (ie, it does not get sent to collections). Of course, most patients don't know any of that. The billing situation is 100% fucked, and the reasons for that are way too long to explain here, but it's not true to say that an unemployed person without insurance can't receive anything but acute care from a hospital, or that they would necessarily have to end up in debt for doing so.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> That said, the point is moot, because once a patient is stabilized, if they need further care, they'll be admitted, and receive care from an internist. No, they often won't, because while ER stabilization without regard to ability to pay is mandatory, subsequent admission and treatment is not. If the condition is not stabilized in the ER, they may be admitted for stabilization to fulfill the mandate, but there is no mandate for admission for treatment after stabilization.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > No, they often won't, because while ER stabilization without regard to ability to pay is mandatory, subsequent admission and treatment is not. If the condition is not stabilized in the ER, they may be admitted for stabilization to fulfill the mandate, but there is no mandate for admission for treatment after stabilization. That's not really true, and it's a common misconception that arises due to the way the ER mandate is specified in law (explicitly, and via a single bill), as opposed to the confluence of a few different regulations. In short, because of the intersection of ways in which hospitals are and are not allowed to discriminate against patients by insurance status, what ends up happening in practice is that the decision to admit a patient is rarely made with the patient's insurance status as a determining factor. That's especially true for public hospitals, but it's true of many private hospital situations as well. (Note that this doesn't apply to the decision of which hospital to admit a patient to - a single ER which has more than one associated hospital may decide to admit a patient to the public hospital instead of the private one based on their insurance status).

dragonwriter 9y ago

> That said, the point is moot, because once a patient is stabilized, if they need further care, they'll be admitted, and receive care from an internist. No, they often won't, because while ER stabilization without regard to ability to pay is mandatory, subsequent admission and treatment is not. If the condition is not stabilized in the ER, they may be admitted for stabilization to fulfill the mandate, but there is no mandate for admission for treatment after stabilization.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> No, they often won't, because while ER stabilization without regard to ability to pay is mandatory, subsequent admission and treatment is not. If the condition is not stabilized in the ER, they may be admitted for stabilization to fulfill the mandate, but there is no mandate for admission for treatment after stabilization. That's not really true, and it's a common misconception that arises due to the way the ER mandate is specified in law (explicitly, and via a single bill), as opposed to the confluence of a few different regulations. In short, because of the intersection of ways in which hospitals are and are not allowed to discriminate against patients by insurance status, what ends up happening in practice is that the decision to admit a patient is rarely made with the patient's insurance status as a determining factor. That's especially true for public hospitals, but it's true of many private hospital situations as well. (Note that this doesn't apply to the decision of which hospital to admit a patient to - a single ER which has more than one associated hospital may decide to admit a patient to the public hospital instead of the private one based on their insurance status).