Word: careful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sense of just how dysfunctional American health care is, members of Congress don't need to look further than their local emergency department (ED). The overcrowding in EDs is so bad these days that patients who walk in with "immediate" needs, meaning the most severe on a clinical scale, wait an average of 28 minutes to see a doctor, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in May. That's 27 minutes more than the recommended wait time for such conditions. Between 1996 and 2006, even as some 200 EDs shut down completely, visits nationwide increased from 90 million...
...those daunting stats aren't enough to get lawmakers thinking about EDs in the context of the debate over health-care reform, two others certainly are: after the state of Massachusetts mandated health insurance for all its citizens, visits to already overcrowded EDs jumped 7% in two years, and ED costs increased 17%, according to data obtained by the Boston Globe. In other words, if any health-reform package expands insurance to cover some or all of the nearly 50 million Americans without it now, EDs are likely to be one of the first places to feel the impact...
...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...
...want to take care of everyone who needs it, but it's becoming increasingly difficult financially," says Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, one of several interest groups beginning to draw battle lines as the details of potential health-reform legislation begin to trickle...
...recent history in Massachusetts makes it clear that covering the uninsured cannot happen in a vacuum. In fact, more people with access to health care will be a burden on the system, including EDs, without other reforms that address problems like not having enough primary-care physicians. Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which is taking the lead role in writing health-care legislation, recently told the American Academy of Family Physicians that "meaningful, comprehensive reform must increase the value placed on primary care and redefine the role that primary care provides in our health system...