June 15, 2024
If the hospital you go to fails to provide you any type of emergency care – including abortion care – you can now tell on them – straight to the federal government – putting their federal funding in jeopardy.
Ok – first I need to explain the law. Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — a nearly 40-year-old federal law known as EMTALA — hospitals receiving federal funds –which is most of them — must stabilize or transfer patients needing emergency care. Hospitals must provide the care regardless of the patient’s insurance status, mental illness or other complications that might otherwise lead hospitals to turn them away. If patients believe they were wrongly turned away, they can file a complaint, a process that can trigger a state and federal investigation and could threaten the hospital’s funding.
For years, those patients’ complaints have been routed to state health agencies, which conducted investigations and helped determine whether a hospital broke the law. But because the system has been largely handled behind closed doors, and varies from state to state and is complicated to navigate, federal officials and advocacy groups for years have been questioning whether it works.
So just recently the Biden administration decided to overhaul it. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services created this easy to navigate web portal for patients to send complaints directly to the federal government, which ultimately is responsible for enforcing EMTALA and penalizing hospitals that don’t comply.
But if you live in Texas – you are an exception to this rule. Why? Because after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, the Department of Justice issued legal guidance to all hospitals in the United States saying emergencies covered under EMTALA include but are not limited to, ectopic pregnancy, complications from pregnancy loss and emergent hypertensive disorders like preeclampsia. And yes, by federal law that stabilizing medical treatment can be an abortion and no – it doesn’t matter what the state law says. The state of Texas sued and a judge ruled that Texas does not have to abide by the abortion legal guidance for EMTALA.
File an EMTALA complaint here.
More from CMS about the new portal here.
