Free Republic

Kicking off the new year with a big victory for babies, women and the doctors who care for them, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday blocked the Biden administration from forcing emergency room doctors to carry out abortions (State of Texas v. Becerra). The panel ruling was unanimous. This litigation has been playing out for well over a year, with separate cases originating simultaneously in more than one state. (Stay with us, because the timeline gets a little complicated and we’re diving right in.) Recently it has attracted fresh attention – and media malpractice – due to...

The memory still bothers Ken Keller: A panicked ambulance crew had a critically ill patient, but the man weighed more than 1,000 pounds and could not fit inside the vehicle. And the stretcher wasn't sturdy enough to hold him. The crew offered an idea to Keller, who was then an investigator with the Kansas Board of Emergency Medical Services. Could they use a forklift to load the man - bed and all - onto a flatbed truck? Keller agreed: There was no other choice. "I'm sure it was terribly embarrassing to be in his own bed, riding on the back...

...The horrific accident (that killed Diana) illustrated the difference between the French and U.S. approaches to emergency care -- a relatively small piece of the French medical system, but deemed by some people to be the best in the world and often cited as a model for U.S. health care overhaul. When rescue workers arrived, Diana was conscious...although she had suffered internal injuries, she did not arrive at the Parisian hospital for 110 minutes -- too late for the surgery that some speculated could have saved her life. Her last hour -- in cardiac arrest and bleeding to death --...

Being a good Samaritan in California just got a little riskier. The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a young woman who pulled a co-worker from a crashed vehicle isn't immune from civil liability because the care she rendered wasn't medical. The divided high court appeared to signal that rescue efforts are the responsibility of trained professionals. It was also thought to be the first ruling by the court that someone who intervened in an accident in good faith could be sued. Lisa Torti of Northridge allegedly worsened the injuries suffered by Alexandra Van Horn by yanking her "like a...

A Spokane man watched in desperation as his dying friend struggled for breath, but he couldn't get immediate assistance from professionals just inside Spokane's Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Instead those VA staffers dialed 911 to get help for the man in the hospital parking lot. "Calling the fire department was quicker than getting equipment and bringing it back out or finding someone who could offer the medical assistance," said hospital director Joe Manley. Paramedics arrived in four minutes, according to Spokane Fire Department dispatch logs. Clinton L. "Foxx" Fuller, 83, of Spokane, died at Deaconess Medical Center, an hour and...

WASHINGTON - Half a million times a year — about once every minute — an ambulance carrying a sick patient is turned away from a full emergency room and sent to another one farther away. It's a sobering symptom of how the nation's emergency-care system is overcrowded and overwhelmed, "at its breaking point," concludes a major investigation by the influential Institute of Medicine. That crisis comes from just day-to-day emergencies. Emergency rooms are far from ready to handle the mass casualties that a bird flu epidemic or terrorist strike would bring, the institute warned Wednesday in a three-volume report. "If...

Los Angeles County emergency rooms turned away paramedic ambulances 8% more often in 2005 than a year earlier, with some major hospitals closed more than half the time, according to data from the county Emergency Medical Services Agency. Public hospitals such as County-USC and Harbor/UCLA medical centers closed to ambulances an average of about 20 hours a day while some private hospitals — including Pasadena's Huntington Hospital, Bellflower Medical Center and Lynwood's St. Francis Medical Center — closed for 12 hours or more.