HHS: Specialty hospitals not ready for emergencies

It should come as no surprise that federal bureaucrats would spend an enormous amount of money to discover what any physician or nurse could have told them: the American hospital and health care system is in trouble...not just one small section of the system, the ENTIRE system.

This study reminds one of the admonition, 'never let the facts get in the way of the truth.' Once more Washington has failed to “connect the dots” to see the entire picture as they prefer to focus their attention on the dots themselves.

The national problem is NOT how a small number of specialty hospitals deal with medical emergencies that only occur rarely in their facilities. The real question is how does the American health care system deal with the shortage of physicians available to be on-call or to staff emergency rooms -- regardless of ownership.

Given the reality, only in Congress would it make sense to divert a limited number of on-call physicians away from a community’s primary emergency room facility to cover a specialty hospital that rarely has emergencies.

Hmmm, my comment about the problems with legacy hospitals and their abuse of the health care system was removed. You must depend on a lot of legacy hospitals for business.

I have never heard of a functional hospital not being able to answer in a trauma situation. However,I have heard of patients being turned away because of lack of insurance or medicaid. A large number of patients have died, because the county hospital was further than the privatized hospitals. I wonder is this still the case.

After all some hospitals do not accapt certain policies. For instance Blue cross Blue shield has a mediblue plan. However, every hospital and doctor does not accept the BCBS mediblue plan. The blue cross blue shield mediblue plan is a plan which was merged with medicare and bluecross and blue shield, yet not all hospitals accept this plan, nor does all hospitals.