Yesterday, a reader passed along a USA Today story by Richard Wolf on Houston’s overwhelmed emergency healthcare services. Here is a quick excerpt:
Ijeoma Onye awoke one day last month short of breath, her head pounding. Her daughter, Ebere Hawkins, drove her 45 minutes from Katy, Texas, to Ben Taub General Hospital, where people without health insurance pay little or nothing for treatment.
Onye, 62, waited four hours to be seen. Still, going to the emergency room was faster than getting an appointment. For that, “you have to wait months,” Hawkins says.
Ben Taub is the hub of the Harris County Hospital District, a network of hospitals and care centers serving the Houston area’s 1.1 million uninsured residents and hundreds of thousands more with little coverage. Here, the national statistic of 45 million uninsured people is more than a number. It’s a crisis.
Nationally, more than 15% are uninsured. In Texas it’s nearly 24%, the Census Bureau says, the highest percentage among the states. Here in Harris County, it’s 30%, according to state figures, the highest rate among the nation’s top 10 metropolitan areas.
As the Houston area struggles to deal with a rising tide of uninsured, it offers a lesson for the nation: Let the problem get out of hand — to a point where nearly 1 in 3 people have no coverage — and you won’t just have a less healthy population. You’ll have an overwhelmed health care system.
“Texas is the case study for system implosion,” says neurosurgeon Guy Clifton, founder of the Houston-area group Save Our ERs.
The problems here, as elsewhere, are many. Small employers are dropping health coverage. Federal and state subsidies don’t make up the difference. Illegal immigrants represent 21% of the county’s public caseload, even though they represent only about 6% of the area’s population.
Many people treat hospital emergency rooms as their healthcare provider of choice (when urgent care clinics would be a better choice — the problem being that those clinics do tend to expect payment or insurance), which is obviously straining the system to the breaking point. And while the story focuses on the uninsured, probably the illegal/poor immigrant problem is the bigger story for Houston.
I’m not going to pretend to have the answers to this complex problem (What? Can I admit that, or will my blogging credentials be revoked?), but it’s clear that the local problem is pretty serious, even if it doesn’t attract the amount of attention one would expect.
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