Some emergency rooms promise no waiting in the ER. I wonder if this would lead to further unnecessary ER use.
Related posts:
- ER waits: The NY Times is half-right
- My take: Diagnosis, Big Dig, ED waits
- A financial motive for long ED waits?
- Why the ER waits are so long
- Is universal health care worth the long waits?
- Patients waiting for hospital beds
- A concierge ER, or, can EMTALA-free, cash-only emergency departments save hospitals?
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{ 8 comments }
Yep
if i was the guy in the ER with crushing chest pain, but all the docs are taking care of people with ear infections and sore throats, i’d be REALLY pissed with this kind of incentive for misuse of ER services.
I guess there is just no limit to the band-aid kind of solutions to today’s health care crises.
Policy makers will listen to the 300-lb medicaid patient with a cold who bitches about his 5-hr wait in the ER, before the primary care doctors who say they won’t take medicaid (or hip, ghi, aetna, bc/bs, and soon medicare) because of low reimbursement.
medicine (and ER especially) are headed for a major disaster. i feel sorry for young ER docs now – they have a valuable skill that is being dumbed down to appease an under-educated and over-entitled public.
The BUSINESS OF HEALTHCARE
Clients not patients
Providers not doctors
Are these not what MBAs teach and foist on everyone? No wonder inflation hits the industry so well…
anon 5:49-
“providers” is what you will get: next time you need an ER (or a primary care “provider” for that matter) you will likely see a PA or NP.
maybe that doesn’t matter to you, but I certainly would rather be treated by someone with the full breadth of scientific training & experience to treat a human being.
RESIDENCY – THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE.
Happyman, my friend-
I am with you on mid-level providers.
Only lamenting this fact, and my frustration over the doctors who are ahead of me…that fascilitated the training, entry and progress of the mid-level movement. Are you with the all inclusive ACP? Hopefully, you have never, ever participated in flourishing mid-level careers, and has no NP/PA or PhD RN/PA in your practice.
This type of program is totally catered to the very low acuity patient. Most of the time, the one that does not need to be there. In my area some hospitals are placing a Midlevel “Provider” in Triage, minimizing the RN Triage role, and calling the program “Provider is Triage”. The “Provider” sees patients like a Triage Nurse would so they can claim a door to Provider time of almost 0. They follow some and turf the others to the main There have been big problems with midlevels following patients that are over their head rather than sending over to the MD. Also, lots of resistance from Nursing. I wrote about simular programs at http://ermurse.blogspot.com/2007/05/top-ten-ways-to-raise-your-emergency.html
“dumbed down to appease an under-educated and over-entitled public”
Illinois’ Attorney General filed a lawsuit against two of the state’s larger clinics, accusing them of conspiring to prevent admittance of new Medicaid patients in hopes of driving up reimbursements.
I’ve yet to hear a single member of the “under-educated, over-entitled public” support that lawsuit. All letters to the editor in our paper have fairly bluntly told the state to bug off.
You might have a better chance of reaching some of your objectives if you’d try to enlist public support rather than constantly insult them.
the Illinois Attorney General can kiss my a**. Maybe he’s friends with the guy from New Orleans prosecuting Anna Pou.
Admitting patients, medicaid or not, is a decision that should be left to DOCTORS, now lawyers. I don’t know of a single doctor in a clinic, ER, or anywhere else who looks at a patient’s insurance in deciding whether to admit or not. That’s the problem with medicine today – a refusal by the public to accept an asymmetry of information.
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