Hospitals Are Forced to Pay for Society’s Failures

From the Washington Post:

Emergency rooms provide the only free point of access to various social services and so are targeted by not only the homeless but also victims of domestic abuse and drug addicts. Doctors and nurses trained to respond to matters of life and death find themselves confronting myriad non-acute social issues. The University of Chicago Medical Center determined this year that 40 percent of the 80,000 ER patients it admits annually did not require acute care. Emergency rooms are burdened with patients who come in for medication refills, routine vaccinations and other issues, in addition to those who do require immediate attention.