From the Huffington Post:
Emergency departments are the frontlines of our health care system, ready to provide care for you, no matter who you are. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1986 was intended to prevent hospital from turning away uninsured patients and to guarantee that all patients in the U.S. could receive emergency treatment. As an unintended consequence,55% of emergency care now goes uncompensated, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. In addition, the average emergency physician provides nearly $150,000 a year in uncompensated care due to the mandates of EMTALA. And, since no other medical specialty is under this mandate, other physicians can send uninsured patients to the emergency department for medical treatment that they do not want to provide.
Yet emergency medicine researchers receive less than 1% of National Institutes for Health (NIH) funding — the largest source of federal funding for research in the US.
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