Tahlequah Hospital Officials Hope Health Care Reform Eases ER Burden

By Dan Bewley and Scott Thompson, The News On 6

TAHLEQUAH, OK -- One thing many people hope health care reform will do is to ease the burden on emergency rooms across the country.

Emergency Rooms in smaller hospitals are some of the hardest hit right now with uninsured patients. Leaders at Tahlequah City Hospital say it's important to keep E.R.s open for people

At Tahlequah City Hospital, 21,000 people visit the emergency room every year, but 80 percent of those are people are not dealing with a medical emergency.

"Ear aches, respiratory illnesses like the flu," Assistant Vice President of Emergency Services Brian Hail said of some of the non-emergency health problems that bring the public to the Tahlequah City Hospital E.R.

To make matters more challenging, hospital officials say, 20 percent of their E.R. patients do not have health insurance or are under insured.

"We're happy to take all comers, and we want to take care of everyone who presents here, but the patients who are here for what we would consider to be a non-emergent complaint do create an extra burden that takes away from the resources that we can put towards patients that are critically ill and injured," Hail said.

CEO Brian Woodliff says the hospital loses $500,000 every month taking care of its uninsured patients, but he says that financial loss gets passed on to those with insurance.

"It's a big challenge, and what we do in the hospital business is shift those costs to those who are insured, and that's been a long standing tradition that's trying to be stopped by these reform issues," Woodliff said.

Woodliff and other hospital leaders are keeping a close eye on the new health care reform law. They hope it will slow down the treatment of the uninsured in the E.R. and allow the doctors to focus on people in a true emergency.

"We are cautiously optimistic that this new legislation will benefit us by creating people with more insurance, more access to primary preventive medicine and that they're not utilizing the emergency department when they're so acutely ill they have no choice," said Brian Hail, assistant vice president of emergency services at Tahlequah City Hospital.

CEO Brian Woodliff says another program that should help clear up the E.R.s is more money being spent to build community health centers in rural areas.