Emergency Rooms are a very inefficient way to treat many patients. They're expensive to maintain and offer no preventative care. But the uninsured use them as their primary doctor. So you get a lot of crowding and folks with conditions that have gotten out of control, but could have been easily cured if caught earlier.
I recently dealt with a case where a young woman had no health insurance (but was honest enough not to attempt to defraud the system by using the emergency room under a false name). She caught pneumonia and didn't even know it. She thought she had a bad cold. She took over the counter cold medicine, which did nothing but hide some of her symptoms and aggravate her condition. She's dead now. Her young children will be a burden on the state for the next 15 years.
Irresponsible people who have kids they can't afford to feed or don't have enough pride to feed on their own when they can get it free are not going to make doctor appointments. Even with coverage, they will still go to the emergency room for the sniffles. The ONLY way to keep these scumbag parasites out of the ER is to turn them away if it's not life-threatening or, if it isn't life-threatening, make them pay several hundred dollars on the spot or hit the door.
We pay over $800 pm for our coverage, just my husband and me, and if we go to the emergency room, it's $130 on the spot. We pay co-pays for doctor visits and prescriptions as well. Our premiums sky-rocketed after Davis took office because he put medi-cal into HMO's and private providers, with the state paying a small per capita premium. Of course the providers passed the deficit onto the paying customers. This proposal is no different - it just adds more dead weight to already over-burdened payors such as us. We are leaving this state in two months. I've lived here my entire life, and can remember when CA had the finest public education and affordable, comfortable lifestyle one could want. After so many years of rats running the legislature, it has become a third-world hellhole. And we live in a nice area, but even we can't take it anymore!!!!! The middle class is leaving this state in droves, and these are the reasons why. Eventually, most residents will be third-world immigrants and illegals supported by the sheltered, limo-chauffered, gated estate community-living, body-guarded uber-rich lefties.
They can have it. We're done.
Oh yea,
now every working still is going to have to pay through the nose for health care every useless bum in CA.The useless will flock there in droves. Bye Bye CA (Mexifornia )