Starting Health-Care Reform in the ER - TIME
// “Many people have long assumed that health-care reform would be a cure for overburdened EDs. But while a growing number of uninsured Americans are getting medical care that way, they are not the major reason EDs are becoming standing-room only; uninsured patients make up less than 20% of ED populations, and the number of uninsured ED patients is growing at a slower rate than that of patients with private or public insurance. Instead, the culprits of ED overcrowding are many of the same ones contributing to the entire health system’s woes. Among them: insured patients who come to the ED because they can’t get in to see or don’t have a primary-care physician; very sick patients who end up being “boarded” in EDs for days because of a shortage of open hospital beds; and a fee-for-service health-care system that encourages hospitals to invest not in EDs, which are often money losers, but in high-margin procedures like elective in-patient surgery. “
