Emergency Medicine

Just for fun, I paid a visit to the local ER this afternoon. The problem turned out to be reassuringly minor and I felt a little sheepish about wasting everyone’s time on little ol’ me. Being the conscientious health care consumer that I am, I try to make use of my primary care clinic as much as possible and I really don’t like going outside of that system. As I was waiting in the exam room for someone to look at me, I thought about what it must be like for people with no insurance to rely on the ER for all of their health care needs. My ho-hum (as it turned out) medical issue still kept me tied up in the ER for over three hours on a Sunday. And I have the advantages of pretty good health coverage and fairly complete medical records. ERs have become one-stop providers of both complex and basic care, a function they serve remarkably well given their limited resources. It’s not ideal, of course. But until we gather the political courage to fix our completely botched health care system, the ER docs and nurses are the ones keeping this rickety ship afloat.