Actually, it becomes a national problem, possibly with serious second and third order consequences. Many of the most prominent teaching hospitals and medical schools are in the northeast. The providers in that area of the nation practice defensive medicine. Their practice standards are picked up by teaching hospitals and medical schools in that area of the country and are taught as the applicable standards of care in various specialties. Then those standards of care become the national standards, thereby ratcheting up the national standards to reflect the practice of defensive medicine. Individual and smaller providers and hospitals and clinics (and some medium and large ones) must then either raise their rates to increase revenues to cover the added costs (which is difficult when the government and insurers set rates for procedures), or limit their services so that they do not provide services subject to the new standards of care (which is usually easier). It is debatable whether the quality of care improves, since as individual and small providers either leave the practice, or go to work for larger hospitals or group practices, and small hospitals and clinics close, so that the availability of medical care is reduced, and increasingly is available only in larger towns and cities. Given the inconvenience, some will skip checkups and care which would have revealed conditions and illnesses when they were readily treatable (i.e., precancerous conditions and Stage 1 cancers), and await until those conditions and illnesses require significant treatment and may be terminal. In other instances, because the local provider or hospital has ceased providing care in a specialty, the patient must be transported to a larger facility. This results in a delay in treatment, which is especially worrisome for acute care situations.

One of the justifications for torts arising from professional services is that it will force the professionals in that field to become better, and so the general public will benefit. Whether that is, in fact, true as to medical malpractice, is debatable, as second and third order effects appear to cross state lines and can have significant adverse impacts.

Interestingly, in Goffman’s response to Lubet, she seems to suggest that hospital staff themselves run visitor lists for warrants, in addition to the police doing so: “Many hospitals in Philadelphia require visitors to show ID at the registration desk and register as a visitor; some, like the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, selectively run the names of these visitors in criminal databases.” If so, that seems like a separate and equally (perhaps more) troubling issue from police coming in to check warrants.

In any event, in related news- I learned of the following article about policing in urban ERs that may also be of interest to you and/or readers:
http://m.asr.sagepub.com/content/79/5/866.abstract