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This policy affects all patients, or potential patients, in the United States and further affects all hospitals and care providers. It ensures that all patients suffering from emergency medical condition(s) are provided the appropriate medical care regardless of their initial ability to pay. Furthermore, it requires that hospitals, their emergency departments, and their staff must treat and stabilize these patients prior to transferring to another facility. 

• "Chronic disaster syndrome thus refers in this analysis to the cluster of trauma-and posttrauma-related phenomena that are at once individual, social, and political and that are associated with disaster as simultaneously causative and experiential of a chronic condition of distress in relation to displacement."
• "Despite the overwhelming need for mental health services, few residents were able to access mental health support for their symptoms, simply because health care facilities and health care personnel were so scarce. Most health personnel were themselves experiencing the trauma of displacement, and few clinical facilities survived the disaster."
• "Families had to find a place to live, a way to replace lost income, a place for their children to go to school, a way to obtain their prescription medications and telephones, a way to pay mounting unpaid bills for homes they no longer inhabited. Without their personal documents, they had to try to track insurance policies, if they had them, bank accounts, and health records, to begin the slow process of accessing government or insurance funds to help pay for their displacement and their hoped-for recovery."