Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid, in the early 1960s when I got out of medical school,” Paul said. “I practiced at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio. And the churches took care of them. We never turned anybody away from the hospitals. And we’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves, our neighbors, our friends; our churches would do it. This whole idea — that’s the reason the cost is so high. The cost is so high because we dump it on the government. It becomes a bureaucracy. It becomes special interests. It kowtows to the insurance companies, then the drug companies.

The first statement is full of the ignorance of someone who hasn’t practiced medicine in a very long time. Hospital emergency rooms (at least those that benefit from any federal funding, which is pretty much all of them) cannot turn away sick people. They are required at the very least to stabilize a patient and find a safe, suitable transfer. In reality, the hospitals usually admit any sick patient and eat the cost of any unfunded care. There is no magic coalition of churches to take care of an uninsured patient who wanders into an ER bleeding. They are cared for and the hospital and we as a society eat the cost. Hospitals that take care of a certain number of poor patients receive federal monies to help defray the costs, but this hardly covers it. This system is easily strained. There are a number of infamous cases, especially in Southern California, where hospitals simply dump patients on the street. But in general, hospitals care for the ill who wander in.