Health care is a business, that’s the way we appear to want it. One of the consequences is that if you don’t have the money you don’t get the care.
There are those who say we provide care through our emergency rooms to anyone who shows. The problem with this is that ER’s don’t provide preventive care, routing examinations, immunizations and early interventions in disease processes.
It also turns out that outcomes of care in ER’s are worse if you don’t have insurance. So the shibbolith that ER care is available to all comes with the modifier that such care is inferior if you can’t pay.
- “An analysis of 687,091 patients who visited trauma centers nationwide from 2002 to 2006 found that the odds of dying from injuries were almost twice as high for the uninsured than for patients with private insurance, researchers reported in Archives of Surgery.”
- “uninsured patients often wait longer to see doctors in emergency rooms and sometimes visit ERs at several hospitals before finding one that will treat them. Other studies show that, once they’re admitted, uninsured patients receive fewer services, such as CT and MRI scans, and are less likely to be transferred to a rehabilitation facility.”
Medicynical note; This study simply confirms that our (non) system of health care is number one in costs and inefficiency but not in outcomes.
Medicynic 