Docs, Dems warn on hospital wait times
Bay State lawmakers and doctors warn that the GOP’s health care bill threatens to worsen the emergency room-overcrowding crisis, which the Herald reported yesterday has led to wait times in the city that are double the national average.
“It is a very serious concern, because that has important health care consequences, but it’s also a question about resources,” said Bay State U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
“That’s why I am fighting so hard against the Republican plan to tear up our health care system, because they would actually leave us with fewer health care resources, which means longer waits in all of our hospitals.”
According to a Herald special report on emergency rooms, the departments at Boston Medical Center and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have wait times of nearly an hour — twice as long as the national average.
Massachusetts General Hospital takes two times longer than hospitals nationwide to get ER patients into inpatient treatment.
The American Health Care Act, which cleared the House earlier this month, would scale back the Medicaid coverage that saw a massive expansion under Obamacare.
This has spurred concern that fewer people would have access to primary care physicians, forcing more patients to use emergency services as their only alternative.
The language of the bill could change as it moves through Congress, but the Chief of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. David Brown, said “as currently written, the health care bill would, among other things, severely cut federal support for Medicaid programs and leave millions without any health insurance at all.”
He added, “The nation’s emergency departments, which already serve as a major safety net in health care, will become even more overcrowded than they currently are. This will no doubt impact the quality of care and patient experience.”
But Bay State U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch said Obamacare has caused its own set of problems, one being that hospitals have been forced to operate at full capacity because of the increasing number of Medicaid patients.
Lynch said he plans to reach out to local hospitals to get a sense of what can be done to fix the issue.
“I’m not surprised it’s gotten worse,” Lynch added, “but that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility of fixing the problem, you want to make sure people have access to good doctors and good hospitals in a timely fashion.”