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Because paying people to be there 24/7 is not as cheap as paying people to be in an urgent care from 9-5 or even 9-9. Precisely because the facility is designe
by riahi 10y ago
Because paying people to be there 24/7 is not as cheap as paying people to be in an urgent care from 9-5 or even 9-9.
Precisely because the facility is designed to handle massive emergencies means that your fixed costs are inherently higher.
Just because you intend to use a supercomputer to browse HN doesn't mean the price to buy the supercomputer gets cheaper. If that's your intended use-case, you should buy a cheaper tablet / go to a cheaper level of care.
EMTALA's greatest problem is its unfunded mandate where people are required to provide 24/7 emergency care without regard for ability to pay. Since it's effectively "free", people abuse it and show up at all hours for non-emergent issues because they don't want to wait.
- maxerickson 10y agoIt depends on the utilization rates though. And the facilities could be designed to handle smaller issues too. The local hospital here runs an ER and an urgent care center about 60 feet away; from a practical standpoint I'm 100% certain that the urgent care could be the same intake as the ER. I'm less certain about it, but I believe the reason it is not is because there are structural incentives in the various reimbursements they get. Those incentives probably do make sense in places where ERs are over used. Here, most of the time, they create redundancy.