2 Plus 2 Equals 4
Study: Uninsured Trauma Victims Face Sky-High Death Rate
I stand in shock and awe.
In 1986....Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. It mandated that hospitals and ambulance services provide care to anyone who needs emergency treatment, regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.
Somebody must have been wearing their pink sunglasses that day.
Such anecdotal evidence squares with another finding of Rosen's study: Even when everything else was equal, "uninsured patients received significantly fewer radiographic studies and were less likely to be admitted compared with insured patients with similar diagnoses."
This just in.......Rain....is Wet!
I'm not blaming the doctors themselves on this one. Let's face it it, in the big business of health care, they are peons like everyone else. Until this country grants everyone their rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" (which I assume you can't really do when you are dead from preventable/treatable causes), healthcare is going to remain a business, and health, a luxury.
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It's widely known that the law requires emergency rooms to treat anyone regardless of their ability to pay. It's less widely known that this only applies to two situations: when the patient is in immediate danger of dying, and when the patient is in active labor. Look at the name of the law as you quoted it above: Active Labor is right there in the title.
Most emergency rooms treat anyone anyway, but they are only required to treat the uninsured in those two instances.
Therefore it is intellectually sloppy to compare statistics about the uninsured's treatment without separating out the life-threatening cases from the non-life-threatening ones. If someone is in for a problem that doesn't threaten his/her life, and can't pay for their treatment, they just might not get all the expensive diagnostic tests. In other breaking news, it gets dark at night.
The obvious solution for these discrepancies is universal coverage.
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