Even as rising unemployment strips people of health insurance, sending many to emergency departments for care, doctors on the front lines say the lingering recession is also prompting an unexpected outcome. More patients, they say, are refusing potentially costly procedures ranging from tests to confirm heart attacks to overnight stays to monitor dangerous infections....
---"Too broke for the ER, patients flee," msnbc.com
This deep recession, the resulting job losses, and the fear of unaffordable medical costs has caused more care seekers to leave ERs or hospitals "against medical advice," doctors say. And how many more are not showing up at ERs at all for the same reasons? Just one more reason why now is the time for health care reform and access for all. For what kinds of problems are these people turning down treatment? From the article:
Just last month, Laskey saw a woman with bronchitis and pneumonia with life-threatening oxygen levels who refused hospital admission because she had no insurance. Even when Laskey arranged for her to have an oxygen kit to take home, the woman turned it down because of the cost....Just this month, Chawla, a spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians, said he argued with a man who refused hospitalization to drain a large abscess on his buttocks; another man who declined admission for an infected kidney stone; a woman with low-risk chest pain who didn’t want to pay for further cardiac exams; and a patient with acute appendicitis who needed emergency surgery but didn’t want to pay for an ambulance.
But for the turns of fortune or fate, it could just as easily be you or me.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30628634/
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