{"id":7694,"date":"2006-06-15T12:29:43","date_gmt":"2006-06-15T16:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7694"},"modified":"2006-06-15T12:29:43","modified_gmt":"2006-06-15T16:29:43","slug":"us-emergency-care-system-at-its-breaking-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/us-emergency-care-system-at-its-breaking-point\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. emergency care system ‘at its breaking point’"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of months ago, a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private, health care policy foundation, showed<\/a> that nearly 60% of all Americans of uninsured Americans with chronic conditions either skip doses of medication or go without because it’s too expensive. Of course, because they can’t afford preventative measures, those same Americans are more than twice as likely to visit an emergency room, stay in a hospital overnight, or both, than their insured counterparts.<\/p>\n

The result is a strain on the system, which is being pushed to the limit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Half a million times a year — about once every minute — an ambulance carrying a sick patient is turned away from a full emergency room and sent to another one farther away. It’s a sobering symptom of how the nation’s emergency-care system is overcrowded and overwhelmed, “at its breaking point,” concludes a major investigation by the influential Institute of Medicine.<\/p>\n

That crisis comes from just day-to-day emergencies. Emergency rooms are far from ready to handle the mass casualties that a bird flu epidemic or terrorist strike would bring, the institute warned Wednesday in a three-volume report.<\/p>\n

“If you can barely get through the night’s 911 calls, how on earth can you handle a disaster?” asked report co-author Dr. Arthur Kellerman, Emory University’s emergency medicine chief.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe — and I’m just throwing this out here — if we had a public health system in which low-income families and those without insurance could get preventative health care they could afford, and not rely on emergency rooms when there’s a medical emergency, ERs wouldn’t be overwhelmed. I know; it’s a wacky idea.<\/p>\n

Of course, the Bush administration describes the existing system as “universal care<\/a>,” which leads me to believe that the White House and HHS don’t quite appreciate the scope of the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of months ago, a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private, health care policy foundation, showed that nearly 60% of all Americans of uninsured Americans with chronic conditions either skip doses of medication or go without because it’s too expensive. Of course, because they can’t afford preventative measures, those same Americans are more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}