On the recordJuly 24, 2012
I thank the gentleman for yielding. Of course the doctor from Maryland makes an excellent point about having an insurance card--in this case, a Medicare card--that it does not necessarily guarantee access to care. I would see it literally every month in my practice. Being an obstetrician, if I'm called by the emergency room doctor to attend to a patient who is pregnant, under EMTALA laws I have got 30 minutes to show up or I get fined $50,000, so I would always show up. The difficulty is that, although she was pregnant, sometimes the problem that brought her to the emergency room was something unrelated to pregnancy, such as a heart murmur, tonsillitis, you name it. I may not be the best person to take care of that particular condition, but, just as the doctor from Tennessee pointed out, it was almost impossible to find someone in a specialty practice who would agree to see that patient. Oftentimes, you would find yourself admitting a patient who might otherwise not require admission but simply so that you could get them the specialist care that they needed. It's a very inefficient and very expensive way to go about getting that care.
