Why Emergency Room Access Is Not The Same Thing As Access To Health Care [View All]

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Why Emergency Room Access Is Not The Same Thing As Access To Health Care
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/04/25/barbour-emergency-room/

Last week, Mississippi Governor and potential presidential candidate Haley Barbour (R) — who vigorously opposes expanding the state’s Medicaid program — tried to minimize his state’s health care access crisis by arguing, “There’s nobody in Mississippi who does not have access to health care.” Barbour maintained that hospitals and doctors routinely provide charitable care and said that residents without reliable access to health insurance received care from clinics.

Barbour may be technically correct — the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act requires hospitals to treat emergency conditions — but as Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt of the Incidental Economist point out, the emergency room is not a good place for patients with chronic conditions:


Over 25 million people in the United States have diabetes, requiring regular access to medication to stay alive. They can’t get insulin in an emergency room.
About 20 million people in the United States have asthma. They can’t get their prescription refills in an emergency room
Over 200,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010. Not a single one of them could get a mammogram in an emergency room.
Nearly one in 100 children have Autism, and not a single one of them can get any treatment at all in the emergency room


(more at link)