Message About Proposition 67

[CAL/AAEM News Service]

Message About Proposition 67 


Dear Emergency Colleagues and Friends 

Today is October 21st.  There are approximately ten days before the November 2nd
election. 

Proposition 67 is alive and well.  A recent LA Times poll has us down by 2 points with a
huge number of undecided. 

http://www.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2004-10/14725061.pdf  

For your information, our TV ads start early next week. We desperately need all emergency
physicians to help.  I am pleading for you to put out the message on Prop 67.  

1.  Talk to everyone you can.   If someone talks to about the flu, overcrowding,
closures, on-call physicians etc, mention Prop67. 

2.  Send out an email to everyone on your distribution list.  Talk to your nurses and
have them do the same. 

3.  Write a letter to the editor (There is one attached below. Customizing it and
mentioning your local hospitals often times helps)

This is crunch time and every vote counts. 

Prop 67 is fully supported by CAL/AAEM, CAL/ENA, the CMA and CAL/ACEP and by a number of
other societies and organizations.

Paul Kivela, MD, FACEP 
President CAL/ACEP 

  


Sample letter to the editor: 

Dear Editor: 

Over 65 emergency departments in California have closed in the past decade. This has
reached crisis proportions across the state. This year six more California hospitals have
closed or announced their closures and two level-1 trauma centers (San Jose Medical
Center and Martin Luther King in Los Angeles) have announced they will be shutting down.
The cause of this crisis is multifactoral.

All emergency departments (thankfully) are required by law to take care of all patients
that present to our doors. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to ensure that there is
payment for those services. Queen of the Valley and St. Helena hospitals and the
physicians of Napa Valley provide millions of dollars of charity care. Inadequate
payments from Medicare, HMOs and private insurers no longer make up for the under
reimbursed costs of care provided to the uninsured and MediCal patients.

Locally, over 20 people have lost their lives on Napa roads. If it were not for the two
excellent trauma centers nearby (Queen of the Valley and Santa Rosa Memorial), those
numbers would be much higher. However, on-call specialist and bed availability are
concerns. Our local trauma centers are not immune to the problem of finding skilled
specialists and having beds available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Often patients
have to be transferred to Sacramento, Walnut Creek, or even as far as Redwood City to
find an available specialist or bed. If we don't do something about this problem, it will
only get worse.

Proposition 67 is a solution that proposes augmenting the existing 911 surcharge on our
phones to make sure that there are on-call physicians at St. Helena and Queen of the
Valley hospitals to take care of emergency patients. Monies would also go to the
hospitals to help offset some of their charity care costs, Clinic Ole and other community
clinics to off-load emergency departments, the 911 phone system to help locate where cell
phone callers are calling from, and training for paramedics. For more information, go to
http://www.saveemergencycare.org 


Source: AAEM (www.aaem.org) 


=====
Cyrus Shahpar & Brian Potts 
Managing Editors, CAL/AAEM News Service 
UC-Irvine



		
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