The answer is yes under certain circumstances. The Affordable Care Act, (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) does not address situations where patients are denied health CARE. The Affordable Care Act is about health insurance. Affordable Care operates on the assumption that if people have health INSURANCE it will increase access to HEALTH CARE, it does not alter our current healthcare environment to include new protections from being denied HEALTH CARE.
There are many reasons that people can be denied access to healthcare from one provider or another. There are instances where physicians FIRE patients by terminating relationships for any number of vague reasons. There are situations where transplant teams deny eligibility for transplants. There are instances where emergency rooms will transfer patients brought in to different hospitals once stabilized. The Affordable Care Act changes none of this, not now, not ever.
Places where you are guaranteed health CARE include only hospital emergency rooms regardless of whether you have health insurance or whether you are financially able to pay for health care. Since 1986 and the passage of the Federal legislation known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, hospital emergency rooms must try to stabilize patients that come into their emergency rooms and hospital transfers can NOT be based simply on a patient’s ability to pay.
You will not escape being billed for health CARE you receive in a hospital emergency room which can result in enormous health bills.
When it comes to organ transplants, NO PERSON HAS THE RIGHT TO AN ORGAN TRANSPLANT and financial considerations may very well become part of an organ transplant team’s consideration of whether a patient should receive a transplant. Usually these considerations are bundled into more benign-sounding concerns such as whether the patient is unlikely to attend follow-up appointments or maintain physician involvement because of patient’s lifestyle, including financial limitations.
It’s important to understand that there is no RIGHT to healthcare in this country which means that there is no obligation for most healthcare providers to see and treat patients for any variety of reasons.
