Bush's solution is to simply cut healthcare. Reducing the Medicaid budget doesn't really cut healthcare at all, it just shifts the costs to overhead in local hospital emergency rooms. I wrote about this earlier:
The disabled are often faced with chosing between paying for food and shelter and medical care. The unemployed and the underemployed have no health insurance. All of these folks delay any medical care until its an emergency. Emergency care is MUCH more expensive than preventive care. And our emergency rooms are full of people who have no insurance and for the most part are not eligible for government support. Hospitals find themselves offering a huge proportion of their budgets paying for this free care. On top of that, government pays a discounted rate for all its services, a rate that does not cover for the actual cost of the service. Private insurance pays a premium fee to help hospital covers their losses in free treatment and to subsidise government discounts. Taken together, this amounts to a big part of the added expense.
Today, I happened upon proof that the soaring number of people without insurance are showing up in our hospital emergency rooms:
Visits to U.S. emergency rooms jumped 26 percent in the past decade, officials announced today. The jump was most pronounced among older Americans, many who don't have insurance.
Meanwhile, the number of facilities able to handle emergencies dropped.
Visits to emergency departments, called EDs, rose from 90.3 million in 1993 to 114 million in 2003, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The 26 percent increase compares to a 12.3 percent increase in the country's population.
Medicaid patients were four times more likely to seek treatment at an ED than those with private insurance.
Putting the above together with the data below creates some very interesting insights into the consequences of leaving people without health insurnance.
According to the Institute of Medicine, lack of health insurance already "causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States." Since President Bush took office the number of Americans who are uninsured has swelled by more than 5 million people.
Our swelling number of citizens without insurance and those on Medicaid are getting a large proportion of their healthcare in ERs. The government pays for those with Medicaid, it's roughly a 50/50 share between the states and the Federal government. But Bush's plan is cut a large number of people off of the Medicaid roles.
So, who pays for those without health insurance who come to ERs? Sure, a number of people without insurance are employed. They leave the hospital deeply in debt for a long time. Then there are those who won't ever pay a cent because they have no money or employment. Who pays for them?
Hospitals make out by putting unpaid care into their overhead, like any other business. The result is the cost of healthcare goes up.
So the taxpayers pay anyway. Meanwhile, 18,000 people without healthcare die unnecessarily every year.
There are two solutions to the dilemna in healthcare. We could leave the poor to die in the streets, or we can adopt a system like France, Germany or Canada.
Emergency Room Visits Soar
By LiveScience Staff
posted: 26 May 2005
11:36 am ET
Visits to U.S. emergency rooms jumped 26 percent in the past decade, officials announced today. The jump was most pronounced among older Americans, many who don't have insurance.
Meanwhile, the number of facilities able to handle emergencies dropped.
Visits to emergency departments, called EDs, rose from 90.3 million in 1993 to 114 million in 2003, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The 26 percent increase compares to a 12.3 percent increase in the country's population.
Medicaid patients were four times more likely to seek treatment at an ED than those with private insurance.
Here's a bit of irony: 1.7 million of the visits in 2003 were for adverse effects of medical treatment.
Other findings in the report:
* Average wait time was unchanged since 2000, at 46.5 minutes.
* Injury, poisoning and the adverse effects of medical treatment accounted for over 35 percent of ED visits. Motor vehicle traffic accidents accounted for 41 percent of injury-related visits.
* Overall, 16 million people were transported to EDs by ambulance in 2003, accounting for 14 percent of the visits.
* The number of ED facilities decreased by 14 percent from 1993 to 2003
"Emergency departments are a safety net and often the place of first resort for health care for America’s poor and uninsured," said the study's lead author Linda McCaig. "This annual study of the nation’s emergency departments is part of a series of surveys of health care in the United States and provides current information for the development of policies and programs designed to meet America’s health care needs."
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