Heimlicher v. Steele’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 district · 3 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The certification requirement is part of a statutory scheme with an overarching purpose of ensuring that patients, particularly the indigent and underinsured, receive adequate emergency medical care. The purpose of the certification requirement in particular is to ensure that a signatory physician adequately deliberates and weighs the medical risks and medical benefits of transfer before effecting such a transfer. Congress surely did not intend to limit the inquiry as to whether this deliberation process in fact occurred to an examination of the transfer certificate itself. While such a contemporaneous record may be the best evidence of what a physician was thinking at the time, we cannot accept the proposition that the only logical inference to be drawn from the absence of a written summary of the risks is that the risks were not considered in the transfer decision. Other factors might account for the absence of such a summary, such as the time-pressure inherent in emergency room decision-making. Although a contemporaneous record is certainly preferable, we believe it would undermine congressional intent to foreclose consideration of other evidence surrounding the transfer decision.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 637 F. Supp. 2d 464 - Guzman Ex Rel. Guzman v. Memorial Hermann Hospital System