IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aph/ajpbhl/198676174-77_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Your money or your life: 'Dumping' uninsured patients from hospital emergency wards

Author

Listed:
  • Annas, G.J.

Abstract

Annas argues that current public policy that emphasizes cost containment over quality of care and equity of access is an effort to transform medical care from a social good to an economic good. This trend threatens to erode the community ethic of providing emergency care to all regardless of ability to pay. The author cites statistics and cases that reveal a trend by hospitals to deny emergency care or to transfer medically unstable patients for economic reasons. Courts have upheld the right to emergency treatment and physicians, who determine what is an emergency, are urged to oppose hospital policies that compromise patient care and to reaffirm their ethical stance. The author concludes that state regulations should define emergency broadly, develop "emergency transfer protocols," and provide for sanctions against institutions and personnel that violate them.

Suggested Citation

  • Annas, G.J., 1986. "Your money or your life: 'Dumping' uninsured patients from hospital emergency wards," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 76(1), pages 74-77.
    • Handle: RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:1986:76:1:74-77_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael Thornton & Shelly White-Means, 1989. "Factors influencing the use of the hospital emergency room among black Americans," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 17(4), pages 59-71, March.
    2. Hamman, Mary K., 2021. "Disparities in COVID-19 mortality by county racial composition and the role of spring social distancing measures," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 41(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:1986:76:1:74-77_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.apha.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.