Public health emergency (United States)

Recent examples include: The National Disaster Medical System Federal Partners Memorandum of Agreement defines a public health emergency as "an emergency need for health care [medical] services to respond to a disaster, significant outbreak of an infectious disease, bioterrorist attack or other significant or catastrophic event."

Under section 1135 of the Social Security Act, this declaration permits the state government to request waivers of certain Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP requirements from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Regional Office.

Examples include allowing Medicare health plan beneficiaries to go out of network, allowing critical access hospitals to take more than the statutorily mandated limit of 25 patients, and not counting the expected longer lengths of stay for evacuated patients against the 96-hour average.

[1] In the swine flu outbreak, the declaration allowed the distribution of a federal stockpile of 12 million doses of Tamiflu to places where states could quickly get their share if they decided they needed it, with priority going to the five states with known cases.

[9] The NDMS defines a military health emergency as "an emergency need for hospital services to support the armed forces for casualty care arising from a major military operation, disaster, significant outbreak of an infectious disease, bioterrorist attack, or other significant or catastrophic event.