Enough Pain To Cry Over Isn’t Enough

My ideas on health care fall about where all my other ideas do – somewhere in between what the two sides are usually promoting (but never actually start). But I thought I’d respond to someone (who shall remain nameless because he won’t respond to my emails asking if I can quote him directly) who claims that the reason our current system is the best is because everyone has access to it and we can always go to the emergency room if we can’t pay a doctor’s co-pay. Two personal experiences to counter that idea.

A couple weeks ago my mother suddenly got a shooting pain in her shoulder. Fearing a heart attack and also worried because it was the same arm her PICC line is in, I rushed her to the emergency room. She checked in, crying in pain, and I told the nurse up front about her PICC line and my worries that something may have gone wrong with it. That her crying in pain and grabbing at her shoulder couldn’t be a good thing.

Two and a half hours later we finally got checked in. We then waited until a doctor came around, and after spending ten minutes with him, we got to go home over four hours after we’d arrived. And that was with only five people in front of us in line. The doctor was clueless, didn’t check the PICC line at all (which we found out later was infected) and since her EKG was ok, decided the cause must have been a severe muscle spasm. Needless to say we weren’t impressed.

Adding more people to this scenario would be insane. You can’t just tell people, well if you don’t have health insurance you can always go the emergency room. Even (or especially) when the President says it.

Experience number two. A friend of mine has no health insurance because she’s currently attempting to find work again (no luck with extremely high unemployment in her state) and the cost of even a simple policy is far outside of her reach right now. So she’s been trying to avoid needing anything medically related. She got a cist that ruptured and caused so much pain she had to go the emergency room. A doctor came in and drained it and put in something to keep it draining. She came back to have it drained again. That’s it. Ten minutes of total doctor time. Cost for the uninsured: $2400 so far. For ten minutes and a tiny drain and a few pain pills.

There’s no perfection there. Going to the emergency room if you can’t afford insurance in this economy is a one way ticket to a difficult bankruptcy. And asking the uninsured to just go to the emergency room when they have problems is only going to make waiting times and the overall process even worse for the insured with real emergencies. It’s not working, especially in combination with unemployment and closing factories and a decreasing dollar value and rampaging gas prices. So I’m willing to hear arguments about how to fix it, but I will never believe that just going to already under performing emergency rooms is the answer to anything.