They will certainly see you and assess your condition.
What they do after that is a question mark.
Right, but while the patient is getting stabilized, they’re still taking up an ER bed and resources, right?
They must, as you said before, provide stabilizing treatment. They’re not obligated to give a cancer patient chemotherapy or a heart patient a transplant.
But they DO have to treat regardless of whether or not it’s an emergency:
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) is a federal law that requires anyone coming to an emergency department to be stabilized and treated, regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay.
Bolding mine.
Ok, sure.
So, you have COVID and walk in to the ER claiming you do not feel well.
What do they have to do for you? MOST Covid patients survive the illness. Same as with the flu. But some die too. So it is not an instant, OMG…get this person a doctor NOW kind of situation. Pointing you to the nearest public hospital is reasonable. That the lines there are many hours long…sucks to be you, consider voting in favor of universal health care.
I think most COVID patients arrive in the ER walking and talking just fine and are not wheeled in because they have progressed so far in the illness that they are dying on the spot and require actual emergency care.
Palliative care does not mean simply giving someone a bed and an IV and ignoring that person. It means managing their pain, relieving shortness of breath, and treating symptoms such as nausea and fever. It means holding a basin under the face of a puking patient, cleaning up a patient with diarrhea, changing the sheets, monitoring heart rate, O2 levels, and BP.
I’m furious with the unvaccinated and would be apoplectic if someone I loved who was vaxxed was denied a hospital bed because the idiot unvaccinated had filled them all. I just don’t see how palliative-care only would resolve the situation. As a doc on my state’s COVID Emergency Response Team said, “It’s not a matter of the number of beds; it’sa matter of the number of staffed beds.”
Is there a lot of crossover of staff in a hospital?
Can a palliative care nurse/orderly/doctor be moved to the ER and back at the hospital’s whim?
I’d think there are rules against that since each space has different requirements/procedures but I really do not know (read: really asking).
I am not sure we can view a hospital as a monolith with 100 doctors and 200 nurses who can be shuffled about willy-nilly.
(I’d love to hear from the medical doctors on the SDMB about this.)
Over half the hospitals in my state are public. “Public” doesn’t mean the quality of care is lesser. In fact, some of the highest-rated hospitals are public hospitals. Shunting patients to public hospitals means that everyone else who needs those hospitals are also waiting in long lines–even those who are fully insured, advocate for universal health care, and are fully vaxxed. If I need surgery, and my surgeon only has privileges at the public hospital, I’m still screwed because of the unvaxxed.
Some people who stroll into ER’s saying they might have COVID have shockingly low O2 rates and require immediate care, so the fact people walk in has nothing to do with it. And my friend (in Canada) who’s an ER nurse, tells me many COVID patients are NOT walking in but are coming in on gurneys.
I do love it when people who know how hospitals, ERs, triage and medical/nursing care actually work saying why it is not nearly that simple or easy, and people who don’t know how all that stuff works disagreeing.
But I’m off this long weekend and don’t have to actually deal with covid for the next 36 hours, while the damn topic has eaten much of the rest of my life since March 2020, so I’m not going to discuss it any further, at least for a while.
I am not saying public hospitals are bad hospitals. Often the doctors are great.
But they tend to be overwhelmed hospitals.
I’ve worked in some (as an IT guy…not medical guy).
If you find yourself in one you will get great medical care. The doctors and nurses are aces.
But, if there is a medical issue overwhelming the community then good luck. Great doctors and nurses but these places are the first to be overwhelmed in a crisis.
staffed is indeed the important part. After a certain point (and we’re close to that point) National Guard and contract can no longer staff the need. A tent full of beds in the parking lot will do no good without adequate, rested, trained, experienced staff.
I think this really highlights the basic impulse behind this question for many is to just let the unvaccinated die in agony, lying in their own bodily fluids. I have a feeling that us laypeople really underestimate just how little medical professionals want that to happen, despite all the news stories and frustration and burnout.
Have one on me.
Not a great thing to tell a self-described recovering addict…
I certainly cannot speak for @Qadgop_the_Mercotan but I suspect it would be taken in the spirit it is given. We can’t all keep biographies of all the posters handy to avoid such things.
(Personally, I frequently get gender wrong.)
Opoid, IIRC. And interesting complaint poster combo.
I can stop anytime I want, really!
Have a couple on us! 
Cheese and coffee work fine for me. And I’ll take other offers in the spirit that they’re given, while declining the substance.
Lake Michigan was beautiful and warm today, spent part of the day bobbing in the water with family, including my grandnephew.
I believe you had some new Tolkien to read, though you may have chewed it up by now.
…sure.
Then fat people like me go to the end of the line as well. And those in prisons? They broke all the rules, they don’t get any care at all.
You aren’t describing a healthcare system. You are describing a dystopia. Which, to be honest, you aren’t really that far away from at the moment.
The answer to this isn’t at the frontlines. You need to take the pressure off the ICU’s by getting the caseloads down. And that means pushing back against the leadership of the States that are not taking the pandemic seriously, it means pushing back on the Federal government that has taken the foot off the accelerator. The US 7-day average daily deaths are now at 1500. These are December 2020 numbers right before the Xmas surge, and the curve is climbing.
Things are bad now, but in 30 days time things are going to be orders of magnitude worse. Because in early 2021 you had the advantage of a brand new administration and a high uptake of vaccination that helped drive the curve down. But you don’t have that now. So something is going to have to change to bring the curve down: but not giving treatment to unvaccinated people isn’t going to be it.