“At Our Lady of the Lake, which did not provide comment for this article, inspectors determined the emergency room’s staff members violated the federal mandate seven times since 2017, when they refused a needed surgery to a Medicaid patient with a broken spine, left a suicidal teenager unattended in the lobby and failed to examine another pregnant woman before sending her to another hospital, federal records show.
Other emergency rooms denied care to pregnant women, sometimes leaving them to miscarry in bathrooms, deliver babies in cars or develop risky infections. Some repeatedly flouted the mandate without consequence, including one Tennessee emergency room with such long wait times that a pregnant woman had to be hospitalized for a week after an 8-hour wait and a man with chest pain collapsed in the lobby, then died.
HHS does not demand fines from hospitals that violate the law except in unusual cases where they refuse to improve their practices, agency officials said.
“Because the consequences are so real, we have seen hospitals work with us almost every single time,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement to the AP. “We have been and will continue to be forward leaning here, communicating our intent directly and very seriously to hospital executives and provider associations which is, in part, why we have seen such good cooperation.””
