The Emergency Room Nutjob Talking Point

So I guess this wingnut idea that "we have universal health care in this country, anyone can just go to an emergency room!" is making the rounds again, this time out of the mouth of the President, no less.

Echidne of the Snakes, writing at TAPPED, knocks down this nonsense:

Except that emergency rooms are not conveniently located in neighborhoods all over the country, emergency rooms are not well suited for the provision of primary care and tend to charge rather heftily for those services, emergency room care fails to provide the kind of continuous care that is really needed and the real intended customers of emergency care (people with emergencies) will have longer waiting times than necessary if the same places are also used for primary care.

Neither are emergency rooms going to provide preventive care or prenatal care for the poor, for example, and it is highly unlikely that the care the poor receive in emergency rooms is timed correctly from the point of view of best health outcomes. I suspect that people wait until they just can't take the pain any longer before going to an ER. This means that illnesses are more advanced and treatment less likely to succeed than if primary care was provided in the communities of the poor.

I had a Republican use this line of attack on me 4 years ago. It’s a standard wingnut talking point. It doesn’t quite square with “brown people are stealing our health care!!1!!” but who expects logic nowadays?

The fact is that reliance on ERs because no other treatment is available to tens of millions of people has crippled the system, particularly in low-income areas (see King-Harbor Medical Center, lady dying on the floor while orderlies mopped up the blood around her edition) and has sent costs soaring that are absorbed by everyone who pays taxes and for health insurance. It’s a universal system, just the worst one you could possibly devise.