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Retired coal miner Paul Perrine says he can’t
get health insurance. Perrine, 52, who worked in the mines for 30 years and
has hurt his back on several occasions, was recently turned down, he says,
because of those old injuries. “Everything is a preexisting condition,” he says. Perrine belongs to the Champaign-based Campaign for
Better Health Care, a group that’s trying to fix Illinois’
broken health-care system.
Members of the Campaign’s Springfield working
group — mostly retirees and representatives of local social-service
agencies — met last week at the Center for Independent Living to
discuss ways to get policy-makers to act. Among their objectives: Dispel myths about the causes
of the health-care crisis. For example, it’s not only the poor and
unemployed who are straining the system, says Ceceilia Haasis, a member of
the campaign. “The vast majority of people who don’t
have health insurance actually work,” she says. Joy Kronenberg, another campaign member, notes that
even when individuals are able to get insurance through their employers,
they often cannot afford coverage for their spouses and children. As a result, she says, more and more people, both the
uninsured and those with insurance, are relying on hospital emergency
departments these days, but much of the blame for today’s
increasingly overcrowded EDs is incorrectly heaped onto poor patients
without insurance. Dr. Linda Nordeman, medical director of emergency
services at St. John’s Hospital, says several factors explain the
heavier use of EDs everywhere.
“There’s a lot of rhetoric around
emergency departments and overcrowding, but when you really look at the
nonemergency patients that are coming to our emergency department, it is
not the uninsured patients who are causing the overcrowding,” she
says.
Nordeman cites a survey published in the April issue
of Annals of Emergency Medicine, which revealed that although ED use among the uninsured
has remained steady nationwide, the number of visits by middle-income
patients, who often have insurance, has increased sharply in recent years.
In the past decade, ED visits as a whole have also
increased by 20 percent, Nordeman says, but the number of EDs across the
country decreased by 12 percent. These trends are showing up in Springfield. Memorial
Medical Center saw 12.4 percent more patients at its ED in 2007 than in the
previous year, according to the hospital’s 2007 annual report.
However, Nordeman reports that, contrary to the Annals study, the number of
people who lack insurance visiting St. John’s for emergency care has
“risen sizably.”
She attributes this in part to the scarcity of
drug-detox centers in Springfield and the limited number of dentists who
accept Medicaid. St. John’s alone handled 1,500 dental and 1,714 drug
and alcohol cases last year, she says. “There are more people who are sick, fewer
providers, and longer wait times,” Nordeman says. “The price is
human suffering.”
She adds that if the trend continues, more EDs, which
are especially critical to the safety net in smaller communities, could
close their doors. “This affects every citizen of this
country,” she says.
Perrine, the retired coal miner, says that the
nation’s priorities must change: “We have all the money in the world for bombs
and bullets, but we can’t take care of our people.”
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 2, 2008.
