"After all, you just go to an emergency room. In a way, he wasn't wrong. By law, ERs must evaluate and stabilize every patient who walks through the door, regardless of complaint or ability to pay. But by saying the quiet part out loud, Bush laid bare an uncomfortable truth: Emergency departments are not just for emergencies, and never have been."
"I've been an ER doctor at an inner-city trauma center for 35 years. And while I've seen plenty of gunshot wounds, drug overdoses and heart attacks, true emergencies the kind that animate medical dramas on television are a comparatively small part of what I do. It's the worried well, the sick and stoic and everyone in between who keep us busy. They're all resigned to using the ER as a stand-in for unavailable primary care."
"Offering high-quality, sophisticated care, day or night, without a reservation, ERs have long served as spackle for a gap-riddled health care system. But emergency care of any kind is costly, resource intensive and increasingly being swamped by unmet needs for primary care: issues best handled elsewhere that end up in the ER for lack of better options. ERs now operate in a sort of siege mentality hold the line at all costs because, by design, they are the last line of defense."
In 2007 President George W. Bush bluntly noted that people can access care by going to emergency rooms. By law, ERs must evaluate and stabilize every patient regardless of complaint or ability to pay. Emergency departments routinely treat non-emergencies because many patients lack primary care access, appointments, insurance, or medications. Inner-city ERs handle gunshot wounds and overdoses but are mostly occupied by the worried well, the sick, the stoic, and those turned away from outpatient clinics. Emergency care is costly and resource intensive, and ERs increasingly absorb primary-care needs that are better handled elsewhere. ERs function as the last line of defense in a gap-riddled health system.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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