Jennifer Aldrich, MD, Jessica Kant, MSW, LICSW, MPH, and Eric Gramszlo
Estelle v Gamble (1976) reiterates that the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution requires adequate care to be offered to all people who are incarcerated.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(6):E407-413. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.407.
An undercurrent in all debates about allocation of health care resources to the poor is the matter of access to and coverage of health care for immigrants, particularly low-income and undocumented ones.
Because maintaining strict confidentiality is often untenable, or even illegal, determining the extent of protections in the postmortem context ultimately entails a weighing of the various interests at stake.
The federal requirement for providing emergency medical care to those who cannot pay has been unsuccessful in eliminating refusal of care and the practice of “patient dumping.”