Emergency Rooms, the New Primary-Care Centers
With 48 million uninsured and a near-equal number underinsured, where are they to go when a child wakes in the night with whooping-cough or an asthma attack? Night or day, asthma, chronic earache or unending diarrhea, the local Emergency Room is the sole remaining available option. And it's becoming unavailable at an alarming rate.
“Long waits for treatment are epidemic, the reports said, with ambulances sometimes idling for hours to unload patients. Once in the ER, patients sometimes wait up to two days to be admitted to a hospital bed.”
So writes David Brown for the Washington Post, in an article that takes a look at what has been swept under the medical-services rug. 25 experts conducted a study and, as studies almost always do, in their collective wisdom they determined that
“fixing the problems is likely to cost billions of dollars and will require the leadership of a new federal agency, which Congress should create in the next two years.”
Oh lordy, save us from another federal agenc…