Medical care Medical care ADVERTISING Go to the hospital People who believe they are having emergencies should go to the nearest hospital emergency department — without fear that their health plans won’t cover the visits. That is the position of
Medical care
Go to the hospital
People who believe they are having emergencies should go to the nearest hospital emergency department — without fear that their health plans won’t cover the visits. That is the position of the nation’s emergency physicians, a position also backed by more than three-quarters of Americans who believe health insurance should pay for every emergency room visit.
Yet, private health plans and Medicaid increasingly want to cut back on those visits if they turn out to be nonemergencies. The Prudent Layperson Standard protects people from exactly this kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking, since the average person cannot distinguish between excruciating pain that might kill them and excruciating pain that won’t.
A recent poll showed that 85 percent of Americans who have been to an emergency room felt they could not have waited to see their regular doctor (that is if they have one).
Emergency care represents just 2 percent of all health care spending in the United States. When truly needed it can be life-saving care.
Denying payment for emergency care is very short-sighted and unlikely to save much money.
Shay Bintliff, MD
Waimea
Editorial
Political propaganda
WHT reprinted an editorial from the Orange County Register (Calif.) headlined “Gasoline price gouging by the government.” It was about how there is a gigantic sea of petroleum in the Green River Formation in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. It stated that the U.S. government was blocking the oil companies from drilling into this wonderful resource.
The resource is called shale kerogen, and you can’t just pump it out of the ground, even with modern fracking techniques. It has to be cooked out by very high temperatures applied to the rocks, which takes a lot of energy. It was tried before back in the 1970s and is just not economically feasible until crude oil prices get a lot higher.
The vast Canadian “tar sands” are a lot cheaper to mine and are already being produced. It would be nice if WHT would stop printing political propaganda and get the facts before spewing a bunch of hooey.
Richard Swann
Captain Cook
