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Emergency Rooms: Our Universal Healthcare System

At a time when our country is going through a recession and fighting a war overseas, most people would question healthcare reform being one of President Barak Obama’s top priorities. However, it is obvious that our current health care system is in bad shape. Although the U.S. does not currently have a universal health care system in place, our nation’s emergency rooms are carrying the burden and turning into make-shift universal health care systems. The nation’s current HMO and PPO insurance plans are what most American’s choose as their insurance. While some Americans pay for private insurance, most employees take part in a company health plan. These company plans often times leave the employers to pay a large chunk of change just to carry coverage on their employees. These HMO plans continue to increase in cost by making Americans pay each month as well as the first few hundred or thousand dollars of their healthcare; also known by most as the deductable.
The rising costs of healthcare combined with the soaring number of people that are either uninsured or living off the government contributes to the deficit so many hospital emergency rooms are now seeing. With the average American getting older, insurance coverage becoming more expensive and primary care offices dwindling, it is no wonder that hospital emergency departments (ED) are where millions of Americans are turning to. In 2005, every minute approximately 219 people rushed into emergency rooms across the nation in need of some type of medical care. However, only 36.7 million of the annual 115 million emergency department visits were triaged as immediate or emergent (www.cdc.com). These astounding numbers shed light on an emerging problem in the U.S. The Emergency Department was created for people with health care emergencies, but with more than 15% of the population lacking health insurance coverage and 13% of them below the poverty level, the ED becomes America’s universal health care system...