Emergency doctors dispute McCain advisor’s take on healthcare

The American College of Emergency Physicians, an organization representing the nation's 26,000 emergency medicine doctors, fired back today at a John McCain campaign advisor who said, in effect, that as long as there are emergency rooms, no one in American is really uninsured. The advisor, John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, said that emergency rooms are a last resort for healthcare for anyone because, by law, emergency rooms can't turn away a patient in need of immediate care. Linda Lawrence, MD, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said in response: "Emergency physicians can and do perform miracles every day, but taking on the full-time medical care for 46 million uninsured Americans is one miracle even we cannot perform. Access to care in the emergency department is no substitute for the comprehensive healthcare reform policy that should be at the heart of the platform of any presidential campaign."