ERs Too Expensive to Maintain

I like narratives which highlight unintended consequences. Here is yet another, called to our attention by Gail Herriot, a regular contributor at Instapundit. She writes (links in original):

Hospital emergency rooms keep closing. A large part of the reason is that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires hospitals with emergency rooms to treat uninsured patients regardless of ability to pay (until they are “stabilized”). Hospitals without emergency rooms don’t have to.

(Alas, EMTALA was a Reagan-era innovation. And the number of emergency rooms has been decreasing ever since. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.)

I suspect enacting EMTALA was collateral damage from that era’s left-right conspiracy to close all mental health facilities and mental hospitals. The left believed in ‘freedom’ to be insane or addicted, and the right wanted to stop “wasting” money warehousing those with broken minds or addictions. I figure EMTALA was to provide “fig leaf” coverage for ODs and psychotic breaks.

Now they live and defecate on our streets. I ask how this outcome is an improvement over what existed when vagrancy was still unlawful?

What happens when you need an ER to save your life, and there isn’t one nearby? Answer: you bleed out en route to a distant ER, so sad.