Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Using Emergency Rooms for General Healthcare

I absolutely cringed when I heard a spokesperson for the September 12th healthcare demonstration in Washington D.C. answer a question from a CNN news commentator. The commentator asked, “I realize that you are pleased with the healthcare that you are able to purchase for yourself, but what do you say to the millions of people who cannot afford healthcare?”

The spokesperson answered, “The government already takes care of people who don’t have healthcare. The program is called, “Emergency Rooms.” When these people get sick they can get the care they need for free by going to the emergency room in their local hospital.

Immediately, I flashed back on my recent visit to the emergency room in my local hospital when I dislocated my knee and fell down two flights of subway stairs. Although the serious swelling and enormous lump on the side of my knee (not to mention my excruciating pain) made the injury an obvious one, I still had to wait eight hours in an over-crowed waiting room to see a doctor, and another eight hours to begin the testing that would determine exactly what was wrong with my knee and what needed to be done.

I was told that the jam-packed emergency room was due to servicing the people who could not afford healthcare. Many of them had come to the hospital for treatment of minor health issues that they could not obtain anywhere else.

When I finally received the bill for my visit to the emergency room I experienced a second shock. Suffice it to say that my emergency room care was anything but free. And when I inquired about the astronomical sum of the questionable medical care that I had received, I was told, “The money needed to pay for the people getting free emergency room services has to come from somewhere.”

I was disappointed when the CNN interview didn’t allow enough time for the commentator to bring up these challenges to the spokesperson’s hypothesis about emergency rooms. But I was even more disappointed when no one raised the question as to what might be  the “government’s plan” for people who have catastrophic illnesses and no healthcare to pay for the necessary treatment beyond emergency care.

Throughout the heated debate about healthcare, there seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around. This makes me wish that the politicians would publically address questions about the healthcare plan on an actual point-by-point basis. This would mean that when some irrational conclusion is put forth, (like the one stating that the current healthcare plan advocates governmental control over the right-to-die decision), someone would say something like, “Read to me the section in the proposed plan that gives the government the right to determine when a person is going to die.”

I can’t help but think that this might help eliminate the bipartisan scare tactics that are being generated for political reasons and carelessly foisted on the American public. Sometimes, politics-as-usual is inappropriate, and more important, ineffective. I believe that such is the case with the current efforts to insure that every American has access to essential medical care.