Just Go To The ER

by dday

None of this is going to come as news to anyone, but the need for comprehensive health care reform now is magnified by massive job loss, which also often means a loss of health insurance for those affected (which is typically not just the employee but their family), leading to the phenomenon of the pre-insured.

The crisis is on display here. Starla D. Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor and then had an emergency Caesarean section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for the delivery […]

“This shows why — no matter how bad the condition of the economy — we can’t delay pursuing comprehensive health care,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. “There are too many victims who are innocent of anything but working at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Often, when I’m having arguments over health insurance with people, they will trot out the talking point that nobody goes without health care in America because anyone can go to the insurance emergency room (funny typo! -ed.). Aside from that being the most expensive, wasteful and dangerous way to achieve “universal coverage” you can think of, it doesn’t work as a matter of capacity. It’s simply false that everyone has access to the emergency room.

Even before the recession became evident, many emergency rooms around the country were already overcrowded, with dangerously long waits for some patients and the frequent need to redirect ambulances to other hospitals.

“We have no capacity now,” said Dr. Angela F. Gardner, the president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians, which represents 27,000 emergency doctors. “There’s no way we have room for any more people to come to the table.”

What’s more, patients entering ERs for routine care prevent doctors from treating those with more pressing emergencies, and frequently patients delay medical care until they have an emergency, making treatment more costly.

Again, anyone who has spent several hours in an emergency room waiting for a bed knows this. Anyone who’s been laid off and seen what it costs to maintain coverage through COBRA knows this. That majority needs to be very present in making sure their concerns are met by any comprehensive health care reform. Of course, we’ve been governed the past eight years by people like this:

Being without health insurance is no big deal. Just ask President Bush. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” he said last week. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”—NYTimes.

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