Posted on 06/19/2017 9:20:07 PM PDT by artichokegrower
Medi-Cal patients are swamping California emergency rooms in greater numbers than they did before the Affordable Care Act took effect, despite predictions that the health law would ease the burden on ERs.
Emergency room visits by people on Medi-Cal rose 75 percent over five years, from 800,000 in the first quarter of 2012 to 1.4 million in the last quarter of 2016, according to data recently released by the state’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
But we taxpayers are worried about those expenses.
I just got off the phone with my brother, who lives in California. He complained about the excessive taxes & the homeless/underclass problem.
That will force many ERs to close
Thank God for your brother. We CalI FReepers never know
what is going on!
Just remember, nobody could see *any* of this coming./s
If they were actually concerned about health care they would allow the opening of cheap or charity clinics to treat people who need health care.
Instead they tie anyone who wants to do that up with reams of paperwork and strangle them with regulations. Because that does not translate into government jobs and dollars that will help you buy votes.
This Obamacare was never about health care and neither is Medi-Cal. It is a money laundering scheme. And like any other group of criminal thugs, they don't care who gets hurt.
The important question is how many languages are spoken in each ER?
Better be Spanglish.
Yup and lots of people will die because they are shut down.
Ditto what you said.
This is utterly insane. This is using the ERs as clinics for every cough and cold.
+1
I don’t know about CA, but initiatives to make Medicaid patients pay TINY co-pays in order to introduce responsibility for healthcare have been met with great squawking and protests.
Open your wallets, taxpayers, and don’t dare ask anything in return from the takers! Unlike us, THEY have the luxury of using the ER whenever they want for free.
A little over a year ago I wound up at one of our better er’s. I was there because they used to have an urgent care attached to the hospital. They would triage you and send you to either the urgent care or thru the er. Anyway, they had shut the urgent care down (I didn’t know) and I was too sick to drive somewhere else so checked in to the er. Was so sick I couldn’t sit down and was leaning against the wall throwing up in a bag. After almost 45 minutes I still hadn’t been called and had been watching the people in the er. They were all chatting, running in and out to smoke, and hitting the vending machines for candy and sodas. There were only about 3 people, me included, in the whole waiting room that looked like they were actually sick enough to be there
I left. Sick as a dog and went back home and went to bed. Told hubby if I got any sicker to call an ambulance because that’s the only way I’d get into the hospital.
It would seem like the next best logical step is to create at every hospital....two ‘emergency-rooms’. You enter door one and someone sees you...they direct you to door A (the real emergency room) or door B (the alternate care room). In the alternate care room....you hire up some PA’s and nurses just to provide regular care. You keep the manpower in the alternate care area to a minimum so that people are waiting a minimum of eight hours to be seen.
“I just got off the phone with my brother, who lives in California. He complained about the excessive taxes & the homeless/underclass problem”
Amazingly the LA Slimes ran a page one above the fold article this last Sunday on the Hispanic Homeless problem that has developed. No interest in reading it, but I’m sure their conclusion was more taxes.
That’s unexpected. Who could have predicted that socialized medicine would make every problem we already had far worse?
If hospitals wanted to change it, they would. All they'd have to do is open a clinic next door and send the non-emergency cases to it. Since the solution is so simple, one can only assume that hospitals are just fine with charging the gov and insurance companies lots of money that doesn't need to be spent.
I’m in north florida. The local hospitals *advertise* the ER on billboards, bragging on low wait times. “be treated not seated”. one of them actually has a display showing current wait time. there is a certain amount of “competition” from so-called “urgent care” medical facilities scattered about. the ER becomes just another doctor’s office I guess, nowadays everything is an emergency I suppose.
Would EMTALA pose a problem for sending patients off premises to an urgent care next door, nearby? Because I suspect EMTALA is part of the problem.
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