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1) “…what would happen if race and insurance status no longer determined who had access to the standard of care?

…in addition to removing some of the obvious economic barriers at the point of care, the clinicians and researchers considered paying for transportation costs and other incentives as well as addressing comorbid conditions ranging from drug addiction to mental illness. They also implemented improvements in community-based care, conceived to make AIDS care more convenient and socially acceptable for patients. The goal was to make sure that nothing within the medical system or the surrounding community prevented poor and otherwise marginalized patients from receiving the standard of care.

The results registered just a few years later were dramatic: racial, gender, injection-drug use, and socioeconomic disparities in outcomes largely disappeared within the study population [35].”

2)            “This model [PIH’s model], with conventional clinic-based (distal) services complemented by home-based (more proximal) care, is deemed by some to be the world's most effective way of removing structural barriers to quality care for AIDS and other chronic diseases.”

3)            “While some interventions are straightforward, we also have to recognize that there is an enormous flaw in the dominant model of medical care: as long as medical services are sold as commodities, they will remain available only to those who can purchase them.”

I had difficulty finding direct discussion of that particular chapter, but according to Google Scholar there are 22 citations of the larger work, some of which cite this particular chapter.

1) “The current concern with new microbial threats has developed in at least four overlapping but distinct domains: emerging infectious disease; bioterrorism; the cutting-edge life sciences; and food safety”

2) “’Global health’ is a second field in which health threats have been problematized in new ways.”

3) “The regulation of what Ulrich Beck calls “modernization risks” comprises a third field in which biosecurity has been newly problematized.”

4) “Although there is a great sense of urgency to address contemporary biosecurity problems— and while impressive resources have been mobilized to do so — there is no consensus about how to conceptualize these threats, nor about what the most appropriate measures are to deal with them.”

More focus on the care, treatment, containment, and management of contagious diseases like Ebola would have increased its educational value, especially to first responders.

With over 80 citations, and a wide variety of sources (few of which are repeated), we know that this research article was infer that a good deal of time and care was spent on this article. There are lots of citations to steel investigation, structural and architectural references, government building standards, similar historical disasters, and news articles reporting on 9/11. Without even reading the article, one can suppose a good deal about the article and how it was produced.

I looked more into the U.S. policy on uninsured patients, ER hospital policy, and how they are treated. If you go the ER without insurance, you are expected to pay the full bill; however you are guaranteed under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to receive treatment regardless of your ability to pay it. There are assistance programs available to help those whom cannot afford to pay their medical bills. Some of these are private charities, there are government programs that help with those at or below the poverty line, and the hospitals themselves will often negotiate a much lower price than originally billed for to meet a patient’s financial need. Despite this, there are still many cases where all of the above are not sufficient enough to keep patients out of bankruptcy. (http://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/go-to-er-without-insurance.htm)