De Oorlogsstaat 66

De neoliberale ideologie kost veel geld door oorlogen, belastingvoordelen voor de rijken en bezuinigingen op onderwijs, volkshuisvesting en gezondheidszorg. De Washington Post bericht: 'Crisis Seen in Nation's ER Care
Capacity, expertise are found lacking.

Emergency medical care in the United States is on the verge of collapse, with the nation's declining number of emergency rooms dangerously overcrowded and often unable to provide the expertise needed to treat seriously ill people in a safe and efficient manner.
That's the grim conclusion of three reports released yesterday by the Institute of Medicine, the product of an extensive two-year look at emergency care.
Long waits for treatment are epidemic, the reports said, with ambulances sometimes idling for hours to unload patients. Once in the ER, patients sometimes wait up to two days to be admitted to a hospital bed.
As a system, US emergency care lacks stability and the capacity to respond to large disasters or epidemics, according to the 25 experts who conducted the study. It provides care of variable and often unknown quality and depends on the willingness of doctors and hospitals to lose large amounts of money.
Fixing the problems is likely to cost billions of dollars and will require the leadership of a new federal agency, which Congress should create in the next two years, they wrote.
"This is a crisis that could jeopardize everyone in this room, and all their loved ones," A. Brent Eastman, a surgeon and chief medical officer of the ScrippsHealth hospitals in San Diego, said at a daylong conference on the reports, which were prepared by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine.
"There is just such a gap between what the public knows, or thinks it knows, and the reality. And it is getting worse," said Robert B. Giffin, the Institute of Medicine staffer who headed the study.
The reports - on hospital ERs, on pediatric emergency care and on pre-hospital care given by ambulance services - were embraced by the 24,000-member American College of Emergency Physicians, and its president said that the endorsement was telling.
"What other industry says, 'Hey, look at us, our whole system is broken'?" said the group's president, Frederick C. Blum, a physician in Morgantown, W.Va.
Two key steps for improving emergency care are regional planning and creating a standard way to measure outcomes, so that low-quality ERs and ambulance services can be identified and fixed, the committee wrote.
Emergency medical care is a legal right for all Americans. Under a law enacted in 1986, emergency rooms must evaluate and stabilize anyone who shows up. That requirement - bolstered by physicians' ethical duty to treat the ill - has made hospital emergency departments subject to unique pressures.
From 1993 to 2003, the US population grew by 12 percent but emergency room visits grew by 27 percent, from 90 million to 114 million. In that same period, however, 425 emergency departments closed, along with about 700 hospitals and nearly 200,000 beds.' Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061506HA.shtml Of:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/14/AR2006061402166.html