By Edwin Leap - March 29, 2016
"Currently, in American health care, experts are wringing their hands in confusion. I mean, people have insurance, right? And yet, health care is still expensive and dang it, people just keep going to the ER. Visits are climbing everywhere, and I can speak from personal experience when I say that we’re tasked with more and more complex and multi-varied duties in the emergency departments of the 21st century.
I’m not a medical economist. I do have some thoughts on the well-intentioned but deeply flawed Affordable Care Act. However, I won’t go there right now. What I do want to address is the “go directly to the ER” mentality of modern American medicine...
I want to take care of everyone. But the Titanic that is emergency medicine in America is sinking. We really, honestly can’t bear the burden for all of the chaos of our national health care. And don’t tell me that if we have a single-payer system it will change everything, because it won’t. EMTALA will go on, and doctors paid by the feds will not be more productive than they are now, so everything will still flow to the emergency departments and trauma centers of the land.
This isn’t about rejecting the poor, or even criticizing Obamacare. It isn’t about single-payer or Medicare for all. It’s about entrenched behaviors and facing the reality of the system we’ve created which allows one part of the system to attempt to carry the limitations of the rest."