Wasting Time With Alex

Just wow…

I wonder how many more studies about ER usage would find things like this one did. This stuff is simply unbelievable, I tell you. No wonder healthcare costs are off the rockers.

In the past six years, eight people from Austin and one from Luling racked up 2,678 emergency room visits in Central Texas, costing hospitals, taxpayers and others $3 million, according to a report from a nonprofit made up of hospitals and other providers that care for the uninsured and low-income Central Texans. One of the nine spent more than a third of last year in the ER: 145 days. That same patient totaled 554 ER visits from 2003 through 2008.

Why do these people need these number of visits? WTF??? The article does not mention it, but are we dealing with chronic problems caused by drug use, alcohol abuse, or other self inflicted damage? Are we dealing with illegals? Could these people afford insurance of some kind, but they are just abusing our laws that mandate service for anyone showing up at ERs? How many of these visits where simply gratuitous and a waste of time? Not much of that kind of information, but there was this section:

The ICC, whose mission is to work with safety-net providers to improve access to and quality of care, has a database of 750,000 uninsured and underinsured Central Texas patients collected from its members. That database is confidential because of patient privacy laws. It found that 900 frequent users — people who visited an ER six or more times in three months — had 2,123 preventable visits in 2007, or 18 percent of 11,600 total visits to Central Texas ERs, which cost more than $2 million. Among those picking up the bill were hospitals and taxpayers, including government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, Kitchen said.

I think the bigger question is how many of these visits are a waste of time, period. WTF is a preventable visit anyway? Someone that comes to the ER frequently has to be doing something wrong or treating their body like crap. Are these people just looking for a bed to spend the night in at the tax payer’s expense?

They have a variety of complaints,” Ziebell said. With mental illness, “a lot of anxiety manifests as chest pain,” he said.

And there you have it. Maybe we should rethink our issues with mental institutions. The homeless problem seems to go hand in hand with people that are a beer can short of a six pack. My guess is we would have a lot lower costs, not just in healthcare, but in many other places, if we started locking these whack jobs back up like was done before it became inhumane to house them in institutions. I guess free ranging mental cases are much better off than those in a place they are fed and housed. Maybe Obama should look into doing that before he destroys the healthcare system by handing it over to government....