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March 22, 2010

Sen. Durbin says HC bill will keep people out of emergency rooms

Ann Kane
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, Assistant Majority Leader, on Face the Nation on Sunday morning touting the health care bill:

The bill will be making sure we have more health care clinics across America to keep people out of emergency rooms and give them basic care.

There.  He said it out loud in plain language.  Driven by profit margins, hospitals across the country can now circumvent the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) and turn people away from emergency rooms in order to bolster the medical facilities' bottom line.

Michelle Obama and David Axelrod pulled this same trick in Chicago when she was vice president of the University of Chicago Medical Center. 


David Catron of AT wrote an expose on the patient dumping scheme in March 2009. 

But no amount of journalistic lipstick can hide the reality that Mrs. Obama's initiative is a patient-dumping scheme. Such "cherry-picking," as Dr. Jouriles accurately describes it, was, at one time, fairly common. Prestigious institutions like the University of Chicago Medical Center routinely "dumped" Medicaid, uninsured and other unprofitable patients on less mercenary community hospitals. Many patients suffered needlessly, and more than a few actually died, as the result of this practice. So, in 1986, President Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Labor and Treatment Act (EMTALA) into law. EMTALA made such "redirection" illegal, but many high profile hospitals still chafed at being forced to treat poor patients. Enter Michelle Obama, UCMC's "Vice President for Community and External Affairs."

A few days ago, Walgreens of Washington State announced the company was discontinuing filling Medicaid prescriptions due to losing money on the deal.  Rationing has begun in earnest, and it will escalate with passage of the health care bill.

Health care facilities, drug stores, and doctors will all join the club and put further restrictions on which patients they see unless or until the government decides to force doctors to accept lower wages; thus effectively killing competition. 

With 32 million uninsured being promised Medicaid under the new law, the first question is, where will they go?  The second is, once they find a provider, how long will it take to get in?  The third is, how many people will die because of the severe rationing?

Oh, and what does Dick Durbin mean by "basic care"?  That's a euphemism for minimal care in substandard clinics.  In the end, the only people who will be able to afford quality health care will be millionaires or government workers; the rest of us can kiss the best health care in the world goodbye.

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