National Health Law Moot Court Competition - EMTALA to SCOTUS

I am off today to Southern Illinois University, host of the 18th annual National Health Law Moot Court Competition.  To the right is a picture of me as a judge at last year's competition with the other judges and the winning teams.

This year's problem entails a hospital with a critically injured uninsured illegal immigrant.  The hospital plans to deport the patient to an inferior hospital in her home country.  The main substantive issue is whether that violates EMTALA.  (The other issue is an 11th Amendment issue since the hospital is a state university hospital.)  Since the to-be-transferred patient has already been treated at the defendant hospital for several weeks, one might think that EMTALA was totally inapplicable.  Both appellate cases and federal regulations state that EMTALA does not apply to inpatients.

But that reasonably well-settled law has been becoming increasingly unsettled.  The First Circuit has never been fully on board with that reading.  And the Sixth Circuit just directly and explicitly rejected any inpatient exception to EMTALA stabilization requirements.  The hospital in the Sixth Circuit's Moses v. Providence Hospital case has filed a petition for writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court, since there is now a live circuit split.  It appears likely that the Court will take the case to finish the business that it began to address back in Roberts v. Galen in 1999.