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Only emergency rooms are legally obligated to treat you to the point of stabilization. As most doctors are now part of hospital ran conglomerates, a failure to
by mike_d 3y ago
Only emergency rooms are legally obligated to treat you to the point of stabilization.
As most doctors are now part of hospital ran conglomerates, a failure to pay your bill for an orthopedic consult can still be recorded in the hospitals system and you could be denied an appointment by your OBGYN.
- nradov 3y agoThat's true from an EMTALA standpoint. But in certain circumstances once a doctor-patient relationship has been established and a course of treatment has started the doctor may be legally and/or ethically bound to either continue that treatment or pass the patient over to another willing doctor. They aren't necessarily always allowed to immediately drop a patient for failure to pay.
- singleshot_ 3y agoKeyword: “abandonment.”
- dcow 3y agoHospitals and doctors don’t do this. It’s unethical to deny someone treatment because you’re not sure they can pay.
- repiret 3y agoEmergency rooms don’t do this. Non-emergency health providers of all sorts will deny you services if you have an outstanding balance.
- mike_d 3y agoI assume you live outside the United States. Healthcare here is... special.
- gensym 3y agoIt may be unethical, but it happens all the time. My father got cancer in 2020 and died earlier this year. During that time, I was continuously shocked at the delays in tests and treatments that he experienced because specialists wouldn't see him until he had approval from Medicare. Without those delays, I think there's a good chance that we'd be looking forward to another Christmas with him. (We live in the US if this anecdote didn't make it obvious).
- wefarrell 3y agoThe obvious consequence would be that people go to the emergency room for any kind of healthcare. That’s a much worse outcome for hospitals so I doubt they would deny people primary care.
- mindslight 3y agoHave you been to an "emergency" room lately?
- callalex 3y agoNope, and almost everyone reading this hasn’t either. This is not a helpful or productive comment. Instead consider saying “at my last visit to the ER, I encountered many people seeking treatment for XYZ which I do not think should be considered an emergency” or something similar so others can learn from your experience that they don’t have.
- maxerickson 3y agoIt's interesting that we just assume it makes sense for the patient to self assess what level of care they need. I wonder if there are sensible reasons to not have a single point of contact for unscheduled care, or if it is just dumb inertia? I know there are some hospitals that have provided urgent care type services at urgent care type prices in their emergency rooms, I haven't looked to see if it worked well or if they are still doing it.
- mindslight 3y agoSpelling out what I implied - my experience has been the exact opposite of how OP is insisting that it should be. I'm not interested in typing up a report of my various experiences with the medical industry and scrubbing it of the right amount of identifying information merely to refute some prognostication that's so abstract it's not even wrong.
- wefarrell 3y agoYes and I have a company that sells to health systems.