[Danae]

I used to work in Sales and spent a LOT of time in Hospitals.

This IS a problem. A BIG one, and it's gonna get bigger. I sure hope someone takes these recommendations VERY VERY seriously..

Thanks for posting this!

[rlmorel]

"...Congress should establish a pool of $50 million to reimburse hospitals for the unpaid emergency care they provide to the poor and uninsured..."

Hello, Brick...meet Grand Canyon.

[Taliesan]

The ER is the portal into our own socialized health system.

The article is an illustration of the principle that once you create a socialist structure, you must continually add regulation, money, and centralization to solve the problems you created in the prior step.

[Gay State Conservative]

Having worked for 20+ years at a major hospital's ER,I can attest to the fact that one of the main reasons for this is because no more than 33% of those who seek treatment in an ER have anything that even remotely resembles a medical emergency.

Sore throats,sniffles,light bumps on the head make up a huge percentage of the complaints that bring people to the ER.

Given that the ER in which I worked was far (very far) from the Mexican border,I can't make any proclamations regarding ER's in border states...CA,AZ,TX or in states/cities that have large numbers of illegals.

[mosaicwolf]

The operative word in this article is "emergency". Most of the people in the ER today are just there to see a doctor for a sore throat or some other nonemergency issue. This is where the problem needs to be resolved. The ER should determine if it is an emergency. If not, tell these complainers to go to the many walk in clinics and see a doctor on Monday. Oh but that costs money! Sorry, I forgot about that. Medical care must be one of those rights found in the Constitution.

[theDentist]

No mention of illegals... I guess they seldom go.

[sheana]

Topping that list is a call for coordinating care so that ambulances don't waste potentially lifesaving minutes wandering from hospital to hospital in search of an ER with room. The idea is to set up regionalized systems that manage the flow much like airports direct flight traffic. That also should direct patients not just to the nearest ER but to the one best equipped to treat their particular condition — making sure stroke victims go to stroke centers, for example.

We already have this system here, it is called saturation rotation. It works but most of the time the er's are full of non-emergency patients. Our area is overburdened with poor people and illegals who use the er as a doctor's facility. They use ambulances as rides to the hospital. My husband was a firefighter here for 33 years. They always get to any 911 call first, the ambulance follows. He has said that at least 50% of the calls they went on were non-emergencies.

Who do you think pays for all those "rides" to the hospital and hospital visits? Not the people who call.

[ArmstedFragg]

a pool of $50 million

That HAS to be a typo. Fifty million wouldn't cover the cost of uncompensated care provided by big city emergency rooms on a typical weekend.

[dagogo redux]

My wife's an ER nurse. I'm an M.D. (shrink), and although I don't work in ERs, I'm very familiar with what goes on there.

I agree with others who have stated that the majority of the traffic tying up resources in ERs is due to non-emergent care. A combination of unbridled narcissistic entitlement, coupled with a government mandate that ERs cannot turn people away, but must be all things to all people, has created this mess. The hospital bureaucracy fostered by malpractice fears and government fiat have also made caring for ER patients unnecessarily time consuming. The many other factors causing the breakdown of our once great society, like the drug epidemic, the permanent underclass that welfare has created, the illegal alien invasion, etc, all contribute to the crisis in ER care as well. Unfortunately, I believe further government interventions will only make matters worse.

[taxed2death]

"It's a sobering symptom of how the nation's emergency-care system is overcrowded and overwhelmed, "at its breaking point,"

___________________________________________________________

Not entirely surprising since illegals use the emergency room as their free walk in medical centers across our nation.

Illegals are a drag on both the economy and the taxpayers of this country.

[KarlInOhio]

I haven't been to an emergency room in a while, but the last time I went to urgent care for a few stitches the other patient was someone who had grabbed the wrong end of a knife in the dishwasher. He needed a lot of stitches, had gone to the emergency room the night before and finally gave up after a few hours and went to the urgent care in the morning.

[SierraWasp]

Lemme ask yew again: What is it with ER Doctors? Why are so many of 'em like Michael Newdow in being America hating leftists who love only Socialistic Commonism???

[SierraWasp]

I wonder if that guys gag website called "NationalLawnCareNow.Com" is still in existance? That's what this is all about, ya know... HitleryCare.Con!!!

[janetgreen]

Congress should establish a pool of $50 million to reimburse hospitals for the unpaid emergency care they provide to the poor and uninsured.

What Congress REALLY should do is DEMAND that the many billions of dollars these bloodsuckers are costing U.S. taxpayers be REIMBURSED by Senor Vicente Fox's "government". He should be sent a bill with a "last warning" on it.

Even better, let's elect a President who will actually enforce existing immigration laws, a man who will actually protect the Americans he promised to protect against invasion (and give Mexico a last notice to stop sending its poverty north).

It makes me sick how our own government continues to bow to Mexico, to encourage illegal immigration, to pander a third world dump without bothering to put up a fight.

[Spirited]

Emergency care is about the only type that used to be good in American medicine.
For general health care best go somewhere else.