Why Emergency Room Access Is Not The Same Thing As Access To Health Care

[cal04]

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)

[valerief]

1. All elected officials should get all their health care via emergency rooms. nt

[murphyj87]

2. Add hypertension to the list...

Hypertension can lead to heart attack and stroke. If I were an American who retired at age 55, I would be likely be dead now because my hypertension would be way out of control, and I would never have been able to have surgery for the lesion that was found on my larynx. Because I'm a Canadian who retired at age 55, and every Canadian has access to health care, my hypertension has been under great control from age 45 to now, close to age 65, and I had prompt surgery (within 4 days) when my GP found the lesion on my larynx, and the surgical reconstruction of the vocal cord after. The Canadian health care system also covered all follow-up care, including 8 months of voice rehab, with not a penny of out of pocket costs for any of it. This is the difference between having health care for everyone, young or old, rich or poor, as Canadians have, and having health insurance with health care which is rationed or denied by insurance company bureaucrats for profit, as many Americans have.

[jwirr]

3. And not all emergency rooms would provide medications. Some

give out samples but they do not have samples of all meds. I have been to an emergency room two times this year and had to wait to get my meds until the next day at a pharmacy. They also hesitate to put you in the hospital.