Strollerderby
Kids are Suffering in Emergency Rooms Nationwide
No one wants to spend a night with their child in the emergency room. But the numbers of kids spending hours in the nation’s ERs waiting to be seen by doctors is on the rise.
The problem? It’s the economy (duh).
Without health insurance to cover an expensive doctor’s visit, parents are turning to the emergency room for their primary care. And they’re bringing their kids.
Forty-four percent of children’s hospitals in the U.S. have reported a spike in emergency room visits. That’s just child-specific hospitals, but numbers are up at other hospitals too (where patients are both adults and kids). This comes on the heels of already growing numbers – even when the economy was steady, the CDC reported a decade-long hike in emergency room visits from 1996 to 2006. Of them, kids made up the largest number, followed by adults over the age of seventy-five.
The chief problem is health insurance, and one in nine kids is estimated to be without it (and of those kids, nine in ten has at least one working parent and is a U.S. citizen). Even folks who qualify for Medicaid often end up carting their kids to the ER because private doctors won’t accept it.
But kids are waiting longer and longer periods of time before getting treatment. That’s both in the ER (where more visits combined with fewer emergency rooms means longer waits) and out – where parents who worry about the hospital bill are delaying the trip to the hospital. A recent Kaiser survey found at least twenty-seven percent of Americans have actually delayed care because of the cost, And that’s what has medical practitioners worried.
Kids’ bodies are changing quickly and their immune systems are less developed. They’re at greater risk than the average adult, and they need healthcare more desperately than the average adult. Which means parents have to make tough choices – as hard as it may be, and as many sacrifices as it might take, that emergency room visit might be the best option.
Have you suddenly found yourself in an emergency room when you’d never visited one before?
Image: CBS News
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2 Comments
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amSame issue here as Manjari. Even the bumpkin’s well baby care is subject to the (sky high) deductible.
Manjari commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amWe have always had health insurance through my husband’s job, and now they are switching to a (very) high deductible plan. For the first time, we will have to very seriously weigh whether we can afford a doctor’s visit at any given time.
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