Time : Doors open @5:00 PM Film – Starts @5:30 PM
Location: UDC Student Center
Filmmaker Peter Nicks chronicles events at a public hospital’s emergency room, where the overworked staff and many uninsured patients must cope with disease, injury, bureaucracy and hard choices.
The system of private and public health insurance leaves many Americans without adequate health insurance. The current estimate is that close to 40 million people may lack health insurance altogether at any one time (Kronick and Gilmer, 2002). Many of these are children. Some uninsured persons, such as those who are young and healthy, evidently choose to remain uninsured rather than pay premiums for coverage that they do not expect to need. Many others do not receive health care benefits from their employers and cannot afford to purchase individual insurance.
Uninsured persons may still receive some health care. ‘Free clinics’, funded largely by charitable contributions, operate in many cities. Moreover, an uninsured person may go to a hospital emergency room, where they usually will receive some basic and emergency services. But hospitals increasingly are unable to absorb the costs of caring for these patients, which they traditionally managed by shifting the costs onto other patients who had insurance, a practice that is becoming more difficult as health insurers pay less in their attempts to control their costs. Some hospitals have refused to care for indigent, uninsured patients, even in emergencies; this prompted Congress to enact a law requiring hospitals to at least ‘stabilize’ patients before they can be turned out (US Congress, 2002b)
Mehlman, M. J. (2003). Health care and health insurance in the United States. In D. N. Cooper, Encyclopedia of the human genome. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley
This database includes journals and magazines covering an enormous range of health subjects, from sports injuries to women's health, from food and nutrition to midwifery, from eye care to dentistry.
This database offers reliable, comprehensive journal coverage of clinical and biomedical topics, consumer health, health administration, and more. The journals cover all major clinical and healthcare disciplines, including medical sciences, immunology, pharmacy and pharmacology, nursing, physical fitness and hygiene, surgery, and others.
This database offers reliable, comprehensive coverage of the fields of nursing and allied health including journals, video, dissertations, reference books and more.
The ideal starting point for public health information and research. With journals, news, trade publications, reports and more, this database covers a wide variety of disciplines ranging from social sciences and biological sciences to business.