It's Not Good Out There for Health Care
Community health centers and hospitals are having a tough time keeping up with the newly unemployed and uninsured people turning up in their waiting rooms looking for care.
The job situation isn't going to get better any time soon. How is this going to play out? It's already tragic.
People need health care. Many of them aren't going to have the insurance any more that they need to get health care. That's an economic fact. Are they going to fall through the widening cracks in this imperfect system? How many people are we going to lose? How many people are going to lose everything?
Safety net providers struggle as a rule, but times are unusually tough. Most community health centers and public hospitals are temporarily maintaining their razor-thin operating margins, but say they can't keep it up for long. Many health departments — which play a leading role in preventive care and are heavily dependent on waning state revenues — are doing worse, eliminating thousands of jobs and shedding services.
"We've never seen it this bad," said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
The stimulus package includes $87 billion for government health insurance for children and the poor, and another $3.5 billion to bolster public health services and safety net care. Federal officials are still deciding specifically how and where to spend that money, causing hand-wringing at these facilities.
A survey released last month indicates most ER doctors are seeing more unemployed patients who have lost health benefits. About 88 percent of the 1,200 doctors who answered a survey from the American College of Emergency Physicians said they had patients who had been turned away elsewhere because they couldn't pay. (Federal law bars ERs from turning away patients with emergency needs for lack of money.)
Perhaps the most common theme involves the recently unemployed who have chronic health problems, like heart disease, that require prescription drugs. When their work coverage runs out, they turn to safety net providers to keep the medications going, said Dr. Michael Brooks of West End Medical Centers Inc., an Atlanta-based community health center organization.
Other developed countries are in recession, as well. But at least in those countries, the newly unemployed don't have to worry about basic health care.
Would it be possible to enact some sort of emergency universal care? Is it already too late to avert disaster?
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