This is an Emergency

When it comes to economics, I am no expert. But I do know something about emergency rooms.

During the years that I served as a hospital chaplain, I was frequently called to the emergency room, often late at night. Chaplains would be routinely called to the ER in cases of serious trauma - death, serious car accidents, gunshot wounds, and rape. I would rush into the ER, seeking to offer spiritual support to patients and families in the most agonizing of circumstances. On my way in, I would see people camped out in the waiting area, waiting for long stretches of time. Families bringing in elderly parents or spouses in serious but not extremely urgent need of care, young parents with children crying, trying to find a comfortable spot to rest as they waited – often for hours – until the emergency cases had been cared for.

Emergency departments are places where medical miracles are performed everyday, by health care heroes of the first order. But to be a patient in such a place – one prays not to be there. Surely, no one would want to have to go to the emergency room for a minor ailment, simply because you had no way to pay a doctor for an office visit. And certainly not because lack of routine medical care over an extended period of time resulted in much more serious medical problems, like the woman reported on MPR who appeared in the emergency room with a life-threatening abscess that could have been avoided had she been able to afford regular dental care.

MPR reported last night that some 80,000 more Minnesotans will be making such unnecessary, harrowing, and extremely expensive visits to the emergency rooms of public hospitals in our state – but only if Governor Pawlenty's proposal to drastically cut insurance for state employees becomes law. Without insurance to take care of regular medical needs in doctors' offices, these people will wait until they are much sicker, and then will have to wait for hours in crowded and frightening emergency room waiting rooms for the care they could not receive in any other way. And who will pay back the hospitals for the costs of this uncompensated care? We will – the citizens of Minnesota, if we agree to this economically myopic and humanly indefensible proposal.

I know that dark financial times demand painful compromises. But decent medical care is a basic human right, as nations all over the world know well. In Minnesota, we should insist on upholding this right - for ourselves and for all the citizens of our state.