According to NPR, some emergency room doctors say the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare") will make emergency room overcrowding worse:
Hospital emergency rooms, the theory goes, get overcrowded because people without health insurance have no place else to go.
But that's not the view of the doctors who staff those emergency departments.
The real problem, according to a new survey from the American College of Emergency Physicians, isn't caused by people who don't have insurance — it's caused by people who do, but still can't find a doctor to treat them.
A full 97 percent of ER doctors who responded to the ACEP survey said they treated patients "daily" who have Medicaid (the federal-state health plan for the low-income), but who can't find a doctors who will accept their insurance...."The results are significant," said ACEP President Sandra Schneider in prepared comments. "They confirm what we are witnessing in Massachusetts — that visits to emergency rooms are going to increase across the country, despite the advent of health care reform, and that health insurance coverage does not guarantee access to medical care."
(h/t Peter Suderman)
No comments:
Post a Comment