The Heritage Foundation has an analysis of emergency room problems. It provides a brief but informative history lesson on how we came to the current health care problem in America. Essentially, as government became more involved with the system, the more broken the system became.
Notice also the chart which shows private payers, as opposed to those on some kind of government program basically making their medical care "free" are the least-frequent users of non-urgent or semi-urgent emergency room care. It illustrates the same thing seen in countries with fully socialized medicine: if you make something "free," people will use it more often than if they have an economic stake in it. Which means the system becomes overburdened, resulting in long wait times and a reduction in quality.
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Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Emergency Room Crisis
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The ER crisis is largely the product of government regulation and meddling. From long waits to harried doctors and surly nurses, to warehousing of patients in hallways for sometimes days at a time, the blame can be squarely placed on well-meaning but ignorant legislators and bureaucrats. To large segments of society emergency medical care is percieved to be "free." There is a rule of economics that says that if a desirable commodity is percieved to be free, then supply can never keep up with demand. That is exactly what we see in our emergency departments.
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