Emergency departments in Tennessee and Georgia are bracing for an onslaught of patients who will be newly insured under federal health reform but still will face a shortage of primary care physicians.
Many of those patients will turn to the emergency department for routine care needs, worsening existing bottlenecks, doctors fear. Efforts to bolster the primary care physician supply will take years to catch up with demand, doctors say.
PDF: ER wait times
“There’s no question that emergency department (visits) will go up (with federal health care reform) … because insurance doesn’t equal access,” said Dr. David Seaberg, dean of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga and an emergency physician at Erlanger hospital. “We’ve got to be prepared for that.”
Dr. Ken Hayman, emergency department director at Parkridge Medical Center, said that because of costs constraints, “the only way to meet that capacity, without spending a lot of money for extra rooms and extra personnel, is to not do business the way we’ve been doing it.”