"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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How the ER works
Your posts about the state of emergency care, while having a strong basis of anger, reflect an utter lack of understand of the healthcare system. This misunderstand is fairly commonplace.
It may seem cruel to push you pain back, but remember where you were. You were in the ER, the emergency room. Their charge is to take immediately life threatening emergencies and save lives. If you don't have an immediately life threatening emergency, you can wait. That's another common misconception about emergency room care. The ER is for stabbings, shootings, heart attacks, accidents and other fairly nasty happenings. ERs tend to deal with those very well, with quick turn around and a high success rate in terms of life saving. ERs aren't for gallstones, kidney stones, cancers, and other disorders which are not immediately life threatening. If you go to an ER with something like that, expect to wait a really long time and for them to not put much effort into giving you and accurate diagnosis. It isn't your fault that this happens, it's a failing of the system in general, but many of those failings come from the legal side of the system and not the medical side. What should have happened in your case is that the ER doctor should have told you that what you had appeared not to be life threatening and then referred you out to a specialist for a more accurate diagnosis. But he didn't do that because he was afraid for his job. If he was wrong (which is possible, medicine is an experimental science) and you had something life-threatening and you died he would be sued for malpractice. He would have been told that he was a very bad man for not being omniscient and giving you the correct treatment and would have gotten fined / had his license revoked. So he played it safe and kept you there, and you got stuck with the bill. Another complaint was the cost of everything. When you get a piece of medication, even Tylenol, the doctor has to prescribe it which takes his time, the pharmacist has to produce it which takes her time, the nurse has to dispenses it which takes his time as well. Once all that is done the paperwork on the medication has to be filed which takes an administrator's time. So when you pay for medication at a hospital you are paying for the cost of the medication plus the cost of the labor to prepare the medication. It costs about as much for the hospital to give you Tylenol as it does to give you morphine. Another issue with the hospital payment system is the insurance system. Hospitals have to fight insurance companies for every dime, and more and more insurance companies are refusing to pay for any form of operation at all. In order to cover all those costs, the hospital has to raise prices. It is the uninsured then you really take the hit. Right now, for example, Medicare is attempting to claim that they will not pay for conditions developed in a hospital. That means if somebody comes in comatose and develops a bedsore, the hospital has to eat the loss. If somebody is bed-ridden and incontinent of bladder or stool and develops a UTI the hospital has to eat the loss. All that may seem reasonable until you remember that the human body isn't like a car and doctors aren't just mechanics of the body. Bedsores and UTIs will happen, so in order to keep their doors open hospitals will then be forced to raise the costs of other operations that they can get money for to cover the likelihood that a UTI or a bedsore will develop. If hospitals are the mob they're doing a crap job
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