Revisiting Michelle O's patient dumping scheme

  In 1986, Congress passed the Emergency Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which made it impossible for states to run their own (more efficient) indigent care programs, as testified to by Dr. Jeffrey Singer at Reason.com. According to Dr. Singer, the EMTALA created a structure that forced states into Medicaid.
  As always with congressional meddling, laws passed to deal with a specific problem have unintended (or perhaps intended) consequences.
  Dr. Singer posits that the EMTALA, which forbids hospitals from transferring indigent patients or refusing care, led to an explosion in uncompensated care.
  On the docket for Spring 2012, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case regarding the constitutionality of Obamacare, which also deals with the EMTALA's usurpation of state sovereignty regarding medical funding of indigent care.

By banning the transfer of indigent patients to indigent care facilities, this 1986 federal law unintentionally denies states the freedom to exercise their traditional sovereign powers to design their own cost-effective forms of indigent care. 

EMTALA leaves states no real choice. Any choice to opt out of Medicaid effectively forces them to abandon indigent health care delivery. 

EMTALA is the heretofore-unnoticed 800-pound gorilla in the room that just might secure the argument that “Obamacare” violates state sovereignty.

  This may be an unintended consequence of the Obamacare lawsuit.
  As an addendum, one might point out that some hospital personnel found ways around the EMTALA.
  One such person was Michelle Obama.
  As with many current Obama initiatives, the program created by Michelle Obama at the University of Chicago Medical Center was billed as something that would "benefit" poor people, when in actuality it was a patient dumping scheme to shovel poor people to "urban" area medical treatment centers rather than the Chicago hospital for which Michelle O worked.
  In 2009 in an article called Michelle Obama's Patient Dumping Scheme, David Catron at American Thinker covered Michelle Obama's role in this scheme to cater to wealthy patients as opposed to those on Medicaid:

But no amount of journalistic lipstick can hide the reality that Mrs. Obama's initiative is a patient-dumping scheme. Such "cherry-picking," as Dr. Jouriles accurately describes it, was, at one time, fairly common. Prestigious institutions like the University of Chicago Medical Center routinely "dumped" Medicaid, uninsured and other unprofitable patients on less mercenary community hospitals. Many patients suffered needlessly, and more than a few actually died, as the result of this practice. So, in 1986, President Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Labor and Treatment Act (EMTALA) into law. EMTALA made such "redirection" illegal, but many high profile hospitals still chafed at being forced to treat poor patients. Enter Michelle Obama, UCMC's "Vice President for Community and External Affairs." 

Mrs. Obama first hatched the UCMC program as the "South Side Health Collaborative," which featured a gang of "counselors" whose job it was to "advise" low-income patients that they would be better off at other hospitals and clinics. The program was so successful in getting rid of unwanted patients that she expanded it, gave it a new name, and hired none other than David Axelrod to sell the program to the public. According to the Sun-Times, "Obama's wife and Valerie Jarrett, an Obama friend and adviser who chairs the medical center's board, backed the Axelrod firm's hiring."  Axelrod helped the future First Lady formulate a public relations campaign in which the "Urban Health Initiative" was represented as a boon to the community actuated by the purest of altruistic motives.

  The article exemplifies the consequences of the patient dumping scheme with the incident of a young boy who goes untreated because UCMC sent him away since he had no insurance. He survived; others died because of this policy.
  Mr. Catron wonders what is in store for Americans since the very individuals who structured this tiered scheme to give the best health care to the 1% while dumping the care of the 99% on to lesser health facilities also structured Obamacare.
  This disparity--favoring the 1% who are included in the Obama circle while brutally abusing the 99% who are not-- is something that Tea Partiers have been concerned about from the beginning of the Obamacare scandal. 
  Chicago politics means that your current friends are treated royally while the unwashed masses, some of whom are considered political enemies regardless of their taxpayer status, get thrown the leftovers.
  Let's not pretend, however, that this exclusionary mentality is unique to Chicago. 
  We all know that DC politicians have the best of everything , exempt from the rules and regulations they pass, after only 5 years in office. Health care, pensions, parking spaces, flying privileges.
  Don't you, after all, know who they are?