Law Commons^™

Modernizing The Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act To Harmonize With The Affordable Care Act To Improve Equality, Quality And Cost Of Emergency Care, Katharine A. Van Tassel

Katharine Van Tassel

This Article will propose a very simple, two-step way to modernize EMTALA [Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (1986)] to deal with this cascade of problems. This solution converts EMTALA into a powerful tool to enhance equal access to healthcare while at the same time changing EMTALA so that it works in tandem with, instead of against, the efforts of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid to improve healthcare quality, cost and equal access.

This solution also works across systems to resolve the conflict between the tort, licensure and hospital peer review systems that all discourage evidence-based treatment …

Harmonizing The Affordable Care Act With The Three Main National Systems For Healthcare Quality Improvement: The Tort, Licensure, And Hospital Peer Review Hearing Systems, Katharine Van Tassel

Katharine Van Tassel

.. [W]hile the ACA [Affordable Care Act] has at least some provisions addressing the need to make changes in the medical malpractice and licensure systems to encourage the use of evidence-based standards of care, the ACA completely ignores the hospital peer review system. This article makes specific suggestions for how to revise all three major systems [the tort, licensure, and hospital peer review] so that they can work in tandem with federal law to encourage physicians to adopt [an] evidence-based model of medical practice in order to improve healthcare quality, cost, and access. This article starts by explaining the difference …