The Cost of System Abuse

At shift change this morning, we got a walk up customer. Guy knocks on the door, says he needs an ammalance. Now, what dire medical emergency necessitated his desperate call for our lifesaving skills, you ask?

An earache.

Mind you, this is an earache for which he has already received an examination and treatment. Christmas night, he went to the ER with this earache, and received a $4 prescription for an antibiotic. A prescription he didn’t fill, by the way, because he either didn’t have $4, or had better use for the money (read: crack or booze).

So now he wants to go to the other ER across town, because he had to sit a few hours in the waiting room at last night’s hospital while they were, you know, treating legitimately sick people. And he’s pissed because the ER doctor didn’t wave his Magic Wellness Wand and make his earache disappear.

So now he wants an ammalance to take him to another ER, at a cost to the taxpayers of well over $500, where the ER doctor will listen to his tale, and likely as not tell him to go fill the prescription he got Christmas night.

And some people would have you believe we have a problem with access to quality health care in this country, and that’s why the current health care reform bills are so direly needed.

Horse shit.

No, what is needed is health care payment reform that 1) reimburses primary care physicians enough that caring for Medicaid patients like this isn’t a quick route to bankruptcy, and 2) allows medical providers to tell Earache Boy to go piss up a rope when he asks for an ambulance or goes to his second ER in 24 hours for a minor complaint.

Of course, the current bill will do neither, and in fact will make both problems much worse. This is something I, and every other EMS and ER provider in the United States, sees multiple times every damned day.

And as an additional kicker, while we were treating Earache Boy, there was a cardiac arrest less than a mile from the station. The next closest ambulance was at least three minutes further away. That’s 30% greater likelihood, at minimum, that the cardiac arrest victim will not be resuscitated successfully.

While the paramedics were treating a mother. fucking. ear. ache.