With anti-choice groups like Alliance Defending Freedom complaining to the Supreme Court that the Biden administration is using the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to force God-fearing hospitals to become abortion clinics, you might want to familiarize yourself with the acronym that sounds more like an antidepressant than a federal statute. (Ask your doctor if EMTALA is right for you!) That way, when oral arguments in Idaho v. United States rolls around on April 24, you’ll be prepared.
EMTALA is a federal law enacted in 1986 that requires Medicare-funded hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment, regardless of ability to pay, to patients who show up to the emergency room with emergency medical conditions—including when that treatment involves abortion care.
The law was enacted to address patient dumping, a practice that saw hospitals dumping indigent and uninsured patients either out onto the street or in the parking lot of another hospital so they could avoid incurring expenses they wouldn’t be able to recoup either from insurance or the patient.
EMTALA has specific requirements: Medicare-funded hospitals that have an emergency department must provide a medical screening examination to patients who show up in the emergency room to determine if the patient has an emergency medical condition. If the patient does, the hospital is required to provide stabilizing treatment. If the hospital is not capable of providing stabilizing treatment, then it must arrange a transfer to a hospital that can.
By August 2022, a couple months after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, states had already begun enforcing state bans that were waiting in the wings to be triggered by a Roe v. Wade reversal. The Biden administration sued one of those states—Idaho—alleging........