Free Republic

The Trump administration rolled back a controversial Biden-era policy Tuesday that aimed to force emergency room doctors to perform abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), drawing praise from pro-life leaders and religious liberty advocates. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the reversal in a press release, framing it as a move to protect both pregnant women and their unborn children. “CMS will continue to enforce EMTALA, which protects all individuals who present to a hospital emergency department seeking examination or treatment, including for identified emergency...

Today, rather than warn women of the potential dangers of the abortion pill (mifepristone or Mifeprex), media outlets like the Washington Post are using scare tactics to push a false narrative that pro-life laws are creating an environment in which women are having to flood emergency rooms after illegally accessing abortion pills. But as Live Action News previously documented, the “self-managed abortion” scheme, planned and implemented by the abortion industry years before the fall of Roe v. Wade, is really at fault here. Even in the early days of the abortion pill’s approval, the abortion industry acknowledged that for the...

Washington Governor Jay Inslee has announced that state law will require hospitals to commit abortions in emergency situations, in advance of an upcoming Supreme Court decision. The Supreme Court is expected to give a decision in the Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States cases in June, which will determine whether or not Idaho emergency room doctors can intentionally end the lives of preborn children by abortion for allegedly “medically necessary” reasons. The Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) previously sued the state of Idaho, arguing that Idaho’s Defense of Life Act violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active...

The Denver hospital system is turning away local residents because it is flooded with migrant visits. Denver Health CEO Donna Lynne warned the center is in a crucial moment due to unexpected costs associated with immigrant visits. What I think is not being said is that Denver Health is at a critical, critical point and that we need to take this up in 2024,” Lynne told the Denver City Council, according to the Denver Post. Eight-thousand migrants from Central America accounted for approximately 20,000 visits in 2023. Denver Health asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide funds for immigrants’...

"Deep vein thrombosis (#DVT), a blood clot in a deep vein, can travel to the lungs, leading to a pulmonary embolism (#PE). Symptoms of PE include difficulty breathing and chest pain. Contact your doctor if experiencing symptoms—this is no time to wait." https://mobile.twitter.com/pfizer/status/1493238623633870850

Months of treatment delays have exacerbated chronic conditions and worsened symptoms. Doctors and nurses say the severity of illness ranges widely and includes abdominal pain, respiratory problems, blood clots, heart conditions and suicide attempts, among others. But there's nowhere to put them all. Emergency departments are ideally meant to be brief ports in a storm, with patients staying just long enough to be sent home with instructions to follow up with their primary care physician or being sufficiently stabilized to be transferred "upstairs" to inpatient units or the intensive care unit

He's reported via Facebook that he's had a heart attack.

A&E performance fell to the lowest level on record in March as the NHS continues to face unprecedented pressure. Just 84.6% of accident and emergency patients in England were seen within four hours last month, dropping from 85% in February and compared to 90% in March 2017. And the number of people suffering waits of more than 12 hours more than tripled, compared to the same month the year before. Medics said the backlog created by the situation would leave some hospitals struggling to catch up. President of the Society for Acute Medicine Nick Scriven called the figures the "clearest...

Katherine Smith Lockler, of Milton, Florida, decided to air her frustration Saturday after finishing a 12-hour shift at the hospital, the Miami Herald reported. In the video, titled “After Work Thoughts,” she highlights the heightened risk of catching the flu this season and shares some sassy-toned tips to avoid getting yourself, and other people, sick. To start, she chastised those who bring extra people to the hospital saying it’s “a cesspool of funky flu at the ER right now.” Don’t bring your kid’s sports team, don’t bring your "healthy children" and definitely don’t bring your newborn babies, Lockler said. ......

The idea that spending more on preventive care will reduce overall health care spending is widely believed and often promoted as a reason to support reform. It’s thought that too many people with chronic illnesses wait until they are truly ill before seeking care, often in emergency rooms, where it costs more. It should follow then that treating diseases earlier, or screening for them before they become more serious, would wind up saving money in the long run. Unfortunately, almost none of this is true. Let’s begin with emergency rooms, which many people believed would get less use after passage...

The bizarre incident began around 3 a.m. Wednesday when the elderly woman's caregiver, a 52-year-old woman, called authorities to say people were vandalizing her car. A deputy responded to the home, on East Bay Road in North Bend, but found nothing. The caregiver called back at 5:30 a.m. and was then taken to Bay Area Hospital after deputies suspected the woman might be having a medical issues causing hallucinations. Medical personnel checked her, she appeared fine and returned home. Then the two deputies who worked with the caregiver began having hallucinations and had to be hospitalized. After that, the 78-year-old...

If you had to make a sudden visit to the emergency room, would you have enough money to pay for it without selling something or borrowing the funds from somewhere? Most Americans may not realize this, but this is something that the Federal Reserve has actually been tracking for several years now. And according to the Fed, an astounding 47 percent of all Americans could not come up with $400 to pay for an emergency room visit without borrowing it or selling something. Various surveys that I have talked about in the past have found that more than 60 percent...

No one wants to make a repeat visit to the emergency room for the same complaint, but new research suggests it’s more common than previously thought and surprisingly, people frequently wind up at a different ER the second time around. Already some ERs are taking steps to find out why and try to prevent unnecessary returns. A Philadelphia hospital, for example, is beginning to test video calls and other steps to link discharged patients to primary care. The new research, based on records in six states, suggests patients should be pushy about getting follow-up care so they don’t have to...

The number of patients forced to endure Accident & Emergency trolley waits of up to 12 hours has tripled in four years. New figures from NHS England show that in November, 23,663 patients in England waited between four and 12 hours on a trolley in A&E. In November 2010, the figure was just 6,579. This month also saw 52 patients waiting in A&E for more than 12 hours, compared with just two in the same month four years ago. The figures show the problems are greatest in London, with 273 waits of between four and 12 hours at Barts Health...

A key cost-reducing aim of Obamacare was to reduce expensive emergency room visits by having taxpayers subsidize coverage for the uninsured. However, according to a forthcoming survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians, nearly half of ER doctors report they are seeing more, not fewer, people entering the emergency room. Tenet Healthcare CEO Trevor Fetter told the Wall Street Journal the rise in ER visits is contrary to cost containment. "It's all right with us [because] we run hospitals with emergency rooms, but in terms of the overall cost to the system, you'd want them to find care in...

A third of intensive care beds at weekends are taken up by patients critically ill from alcohol, according to the NHS’s head of critical care. Dr. Bob Winter said it had become socially acceptable for people to drink themselves into an “anesthetized state” on Friday and Saturday nights, and he also warned of the trend of “front-loading”—becoming intoxicated before going out. The prices at supermarkets and off-licenses were so cheap it was possible to buy enough alcohol to “die from” with a £10 note, he added. Dr. Winter called for an urgent change in the culture of drinking and said...

Failure: ObamaCare is driving millions of people into Medicaid, a program we now know does nothing to improve health and actually drives emergency-room use higher. A central premise of ObamaCare was that vastly expanding Medicaid would ultimately save health care dollars. The millions of uninsured gaining access to Medicaid would no longer crowd costly emergency rooms looking for care, the thinking went. And that improved access would keep them healthier. Turns out that neither of those claims is true.

Expanding health insurance coverage for the poor leads to a significant increase in costly emergency room visits, according to a new study. The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, raises the possibility of trouble ahead as millions of people gain health insurance through expansion of Medicaid under the new health care reform law, coverage that began kicking in on Wednesday. The 18-month study followed 25,000 low-income Oregonians who won Medicaid coverage in a lottery as part of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a major policy research initiative. Researchers observed a 40 percent increase in emergency room visits among the...

A third of GPs say patients should be charged for going to A&E, according to a poll. They want to impose a basic fee of up to £10 a time to deter the public from turning up with “trivial” complaints. A survey of 800 family doctors found that many believe patients are going to A&E at the “drop of the hat” because they can’t be bothered to wait for an appointment. But the findings will prompt anger among members of the public who feel they have no choice but to go to casualty because they can’t see their GP—especially at...

Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits as people sought care from primary care doctors. But a rigorous new study conducted in Oregon has flipped that assumption on its head, finding that the newly insured actually went to the emergency room more often. The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made...