Shadowfax, you make it sound so easy: “But when you underfund primary care, create a system which reward procedures and skimps on cognitive services, freeze Medicare reimbursements on top of it all, it is predictable and unsurprising that the more time- and resource-intensive acute illnesses get shunted to the ER. While it’s good for my business, it is decidedly not good for patients, who deserve to be cared for when possible by their personal doctors in a setting where they can devote sufficient time to their care, and it is not good for the country, because ER care is incomplete, fragmented, and expensive.

Memo to Congress: fix primary care, and much of the ER crisis will be alleviated, too.”