But let us imagine that you really could get care in your doctor’s office for every illness not serious enough to require hospitalization. Let us further imagine that your doctor’s office was actually equipped to distinguish indigestion from a heart attack and serious from trivial causes of abdominal pain. Let us even suppose that your doctor could evaluate and treat minor injuries not requiring a surgical specialist.

How much money could we save?

Do you have any idea what percentage of the U.S. health care budget is spent on emergency care? If you read the headline, you know the answer. That’s right. Just two cents of every dollar spent on health care in the United States are used to pay for emergency care.

So if we could just get everyone without a life-threatening problem out of my ED, we would slash the health-care budget by a lot less than 2%, because nearly all of them would get care somewhere else, and it wouldn’t be free wherever that might be.

In the halls of Congress we hear all the time this nonsense about the need to get all the patients without true emergencies out of those expensive emergency departments. And nonsense is exactly what it is.

We are the 2%! Occupy Capitol Hill!

This recurring feature presents posts by various EM bloggers. Read the original post at bobsolomon.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-2.html. Reprinted with permission.