Pressure on the emergency department: the expanding right to medical care

Lack of a comprehensive health care system in the United States has resulted in a series of legal cases that have expanded the common-law right to care in the hospital emergency department, thereby bringing increased pressure on hospitals to provide care under an ever-widening variety of nonemergency conditions. Health care legislation at the state and federal level during the 1980s expanded the concept of physician duty to include women in labor as well as any condition that could reasonably be expected to lead to serious impairment to bodily functions or serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part. Presently, any patient presenting to a hospital ED must be examined to determine whether an emergency exists. The expanding definition of an emergency and mandated patient examination requirements have hit urban hospitals particularly hard, as the uninsured and disenfranchised increasingly find the ED their only source of medical care. The United States needs a national health care solution that does not rely on the ED as the locus of care for general medical practice. Failure to act will jeopardize the ability of hospital EDs to provide the highly specialized care that only they can provide and will put more hospitals at financial risk as they struggle to comply with state and federal law while serving a growing population of uninsured and underinsured patients.