Romney flip-flop of the week: is emergency room care a good substitute for health insurance

[Texas Lawyer]

Romney in 2012: "Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance ... if someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and — and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital and give them care."

Romney in 2010: "It doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/09/25/161719767/romney-medicaid-remarks-raise-eyebrows?ft=1&f=1014&sc=tw

[Arkansas Granny]

1. Where is the emergency room where you can get entirely free care?

My experience with emergency rooms has taught me this:

1. People without insurance are billed at a higher rate that people who have insurance. They may give you a deduction for being uninsured, but you are still liable for the balance of the cost of treatment.

2. They will ask you to make payment arrangements on your bill even before you are treated.

3. Even if you are making regular payments on your bill, if it is not paid in full after a certain number of months, your account will be turned over to a collection agency.

4. Your wages can be garnished for unpaid medicals bills.

5. You will receive enought treatment to get you back out the door with instructions to see your doctor for follow up treatment.

I would like for anyone to tell me how that is entirely free care with no responsiblilty.

[Texas Lawyer]

2. There is no "free care." The uninsured are billed at a rate often 10 times the rate of the insured

and -- even if the uninsured cannot afford to pay -- the expense is passed on to us all.

ER care is the LEAST efficient method of health care delivery.

[1-Old-Man]

3. Gloom on this: Care is to treatment as Education is to training

You do not get care in an Emergency Room, you get treatment. Treatment and care are not the same thing in the same sense that Education and Training are not the same thing.