Can Doctors Refuse Patients Without Insurance
Doctors Accepting Patients Without Insurance
Lacking health insurance can prevent you from getting medical treatment, but federal law makes one exception for hospital emergency rooms. The law dates to 1986 and the passage of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. This requires certain hospitals to treat acutely ill patients, whether or not they have medical insurance. Sometimes, she notes, patients indicate they can't afford to be seen and if the doctor won't treat them for free they will refuse care. 'In those cases, the doctor might bring staff members in to go over costs, but it will ultimately come down to whether the physician thinks it's okay to let them walk away.'
Can Doctors Refuse Patients Without Insurance Cost
The history of refusing to treatDuring the early HIV/AIDS era in the 1980s, when there was little known about the disease, some physicians and other healthcare workers refused to treat HIV-infected patients. In 1992 the American Medical Association (AMA) declared in an ethics opinion that: “A physician may not ethically refuse to treat a patient whose condition is within the physician’s current realm of competence solely because the patient is seropositive for HIV. Persons who are seropositive should not be subjected to discrimination based on fear or prejudice”—AMA Opinion 9.131 (March 992, updated June 1996 and June 1998).Similarly, the American Dental Association stated in its Principles of Ethics and Code of Professional Conduct that: “A dentist has a general obligation to provide care to those in need. A decision not to provide treatment to an individual because the individual has AIDS or is HIV seropositive based solely on that fact is unethical.”—American Dental Association, ADA Principles of Ethics and Code of Professional Conduct III §4.A.1 (2012).During the recent Ebola outbreak, healthcare personnel were once again refusing to treat infected patients.