The rising cost of medical services is driving up the price of health care throughout the industry. There’s perhaps no better illustration of that phenomenon than hospitals’ emergency departments, since ER trips are the most expensive type of health care delivery. In fact, a new NIH-funded study finds the average cost for an ER visit was over $2,000 — about 40 percent more than most people spend on their rent each month.http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/03/01/1659021/average-er-trip/
But then again that is what Republicans have been flogging as a feasible health care plan repeatedly over the past few years as they try to destroy the fledgling (PPACA) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) before even the most cost saving provisions kick in in 2014.
Prominent GOP'ers such as Rep. Paul Broun and Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant are on the record as stating that "all" Americans have health care because they can just show up at their nearest hospital emergency room and be attended to:
Hell - even failed (thankfully) 2012 Republican Presidential nominee Willard Romney was touting this idiocy in his effort to defeat Barack Obama:
WASHINGTON -- Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured.
"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/23/mitt-romney-60-minutes-health-care_n_1908129.html
That's one of those "bold" new leadership ideas that the conservanuts tried to foist upon America in the last election. Fortunately a majority of Americans rejected it outright.
But The Gadfly wonders exactly what are we to make of this foolishness when one of the major political parties in the country is so fucking insane and radical in their thinking where their view that exorbitant care dished out on the fly in hospital emergency/trauma rooms is a viable form of "health care?" How is it that we as a nation are not just simply laughing these ignorant and uncaring morons out of the national discussion on the critical issue of the very real health care crisis that exists and is worsening in this country?
While The Gadfly feels that the PPACA falls far short of the benefits that a single-payer or national health care plan would provide Americans, there is no doubt, except in the feeble brains of these neanderthals on the right, that at the blind rate that we are going with our present bloated and costly for profit system, it is just a matter of time before the whole house of cards that it is implodes in upon itself.
So The Gadfly begs those of you who are sane enough to understand this stuff - the next time you hear some right winger mindlessly bashing Obamacare, ask them what their solution is - and if it is anything like the solution that the Paul Brouns and the Phil Bryants and the Willard Romneys of the world are advocating - just laugh out loud in their faces - let some spittle fly to underscore your scorn. Perhaps collectively humiliating these cretins on a regular basis and denying them a seat at the table of the national discussion on the issue will result in some progress on solving the health care nightmare that all too many Americans have faced, are facing or at some point in their lives will undoubtedly face.
----TFG
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