In U.S Hospitals, Emergency Care in Critical Condition
By Don Snyder
FOX NEWS
May 1, 2006
Data from the American College of Emergency Physicians, which represents 23,000 ER doctors, paints a chilling picture of a system in decline. The capacity of the nation’s emergency systems has decreased by 14 percent since 1993, ACEP says, as more than one thousand hospitals have closed their emergency departments nationwide. Meanwhile, demand continues to increase, with 114 million ER visits reported in 2003, the highest number the CDC has ever recorded.
Single-Payer Solution?
Doctors interviewed for this article unanimously decried the deterioration of emergency care and see a single-payer universal health plan as the answer. They point out that government programs could meet important health needs and operate with less overhead than private plans designed to make profits and satisfy stockholders.
For example, according to (Dr. Peter Viccellio, the head of the emergency department at Stony Brook University Hospital), Medicare operates with a 3 percent overhead compared to private insurers who spend 30 percent on overhead.
Stony Brook University Hospital spends $15 million dollars a year on billing because the private plans are so different and criteria for payment so complex. A single payer system would eliminate the need for each hospital to operate its own billing department.
“I could vaccinate a lot of kids with the $15 million our hospital would save,” said Dr. Viccellio.
However, the medical community is itself divided on this issue of universal health care.
In August 2003, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association proposed a national health insurance program that had been endorsed by more than 8,000 doctors, including two former surgeons general.
The American Medical Association, the largest medical organization in the United States, immediately distanced itself from the article. It said that while JAMA was associated with the AMA, the publication is editorially independent. The AMA has historically opposed a national health insurance system.
AMA president Donald Palmisano, responding in 2003 to the JAMA proposal, acknowledged that “a solution is desperately needed.” However, he said that a national health care system would “ration care, increase bureaucracy and demoralize doctors and patients.”
Doctors who support a national health care plan acknowledge that a prerequisite for adoption of universal health care in the United States is a fundamental change in attitude by Americans.
“The commitment to health care is a commitment by an entire society,” said (Dr. Angela Gardner, head of the task force that studied the nation’s emergency health care facilities). “I think at the moment Americans struggle with how much they are committed to health care for everyone.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,193883,00.html
Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D.
By including a comment by former AMA president Donald Palmisano dredged from their 2003 files, FOX NEWS has provided a “fair and balanced” report. But even FOX NEWS couldn’t deny that all physicians interviewed for this report were unanimous is seeing “a single-payer universal health plan as the answer.”