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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
Patient Dumping: Implications For The Elderly, George P. Smith Ii
Patient Dumping: Implications For The Elderly, George P. Smith Ii
Scholarly Articles
Before 1986, the Common Law provided that physicians and hospitals had no duty to admit or treat persons who sought their care except in limited circumstances. Congress enacted The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to curb this so-called patient-dumping problem. EMTALA provides, essentially, that Medicare-participating hospitals must treat all patients who arrive in emergency conditions.
This article first discusses the patient-dumping problem and how EMTALA has provoked many hospitals to curtail their emergency facilities in order to avoid treating indigent and uninsured patients. The Article then proceeds to analyze the specifics of EMTALA’s main statutory provision, Section …
Terminal Sedation As Palliative Care: Revalidating A Right To A Good Death, George P. Smith Ii
Terminal Sedation As Palliative Care: Revalidating A Right To A Good Death, George P. Smith Ii
Scholarly Articles
Not everyone finds a “salvific meaning” in suffering. Indeed, even those who do subscribe to this interpretation recognize the responsibility of each individual to show not only sensitivity and compassion but render assistance to those in distress. Pharmacologic hypnosis, morphine intoxication, and terminal sedation provide their own type of medical “salvation” to the terminally ill patient suffering unremitting pain. More and more states are enacting legislation that recognizes this need of the dying to receive relief through regulated administration of controlled substances. Wider legislative recognition of this need would go far toward allowing physicians, in the exercise of their reasonable …