Gubernatorial candidates across Tennessee today are filing away remarks U.S. Rep. Diane Black, R-Gallatin, recently made on MSNBC about changing a federal law in order to allow hospital emergency departments to turn away patients.
"I would get rid of a law that says that you are not allowed, as a health care professional, to make that decision about whether someone can be appropriately treated the next day, or at a walk-in clinic, or at their doctor," she said.
The problem is that, with the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act, many hospital emergency rooms have become treatment centers for sniffles, sore throats, and minor aches and pains. Since they are not allowed to turn away patients, the hospitals treat them even though they could be handled more efficiently - and cheaply - elsewhere. And, all too often, the hospital ends up eating the cost of treatment because patients can't or won't pay.
Erlanger Health System, for instance, in its 2016 annual report, said it provided $90 million in uncompensated care the previous year.
Black, one of several formidable Republican candidates for governor in 2018, was simply trying to sound the alarm - "an emergency room is not the proper place" for treatment - about one of the reasons health care costs are always climbing.
Yet, if necessary, her remarks will be revived to cast the former nurse as heartless, cruel and a hater of the poor. Why she said what she said will not be a part of any account - just that such a suggestion would deny health care to the state's most vulnerable individuals.
Such is the cesspool of negative campaigning today.
But Black was raising an issue that should be raised in any future health care debates. If health care is a right, and patients bear no responsibility for their own care, the problem will continue to worsen. More patients will use emergency rooms as their first line of defense, uncompensated health care at U.S. hospitals will increase and the federal government will feel more pressure to spend money it doesn't have to be involved in that compensation, lest the hospitals live in the red and eventually close.
If health care is a privilege, and patients do bear some responsibility, hospitals must have some way of re-directing patients away from emergency rooms, where minutes spent treating an ingrown toenail might be the extra minutes needed to save a car crash victim.
We believe, unfortunately, Congress and the federal government, won't spend the time to deal with the issue, and eventually all emergency rooms will have, as several Nashville hospitals do already as noted in a recent Nashville Tennessean report, fast-track or step-down units to treat the minor ailments.
Also, to be sure, if it becomes necessary, Black will hear her words again - and not for the warning she tried to issue.