While this is roughly true technically (under the EMTALA Act in 1986, only hospitals which receive payments from the Department of Human and Health Services or for Medicare and Medicaid are required to provide stabilizing care in emergency rooms), it’s misleading because there are very few hospitals in America which do not accept payments either from HHS or Medicare/Medicaid, so there are hardly any hospitals that can ‘send you away’. I’m not sure you’re right that hospitals have a lot of leeway to decide what is an emergency requiring stabilizing care and what isn’t either, but I don’t know much about the law in that area. Do you have any cites for this? The link you posted says that hospitals are allowed to refuse care to patients, but it doesn’t say anything about when they can refuse care in the emergency room.
And as far as I was aware Obama’s bill didn’t change anything with regard to emergency room care for the uninsured anyway.
This is the dilemma we’re facing, he’s currently covered under his employer (here’s me, employed by a major Fortune 500 mega-corp, and my kid goes out and gets a part-time job with better health coverage than mine… durn whippersnappers:rolleyes:). He needs to quit to return to fulltime studenthood, but we’re unsure how to add him back to ours. The old version of our insurance required 12 semester hours minimum, and we’re trying to figure whether he’ll have to keep that load all the way through. He’s also taking some umm, vocational training as well during this time that makes a 12-hour semester hard to manage.
More thanks to everyone who posted. We’re trying to rummage through all the info now.