Have you been to the emergency room lately? Waits are long. Why? Because they have become the doctor’s office for the uninsured. Well Mitt Romney thinks that is actually a good idea:

Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured.

“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance,” he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday night. “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

The problem with this approach is the lack of preventive care. People can’t go for regular check-ups, so things like blood pressure and cholesterol get out of control. When they finally reach the boiling point, people go to the ER with a full blown heart attack, and now what would have been a cheap visit turns into a very expensive one.

Now this brings us to the second problem – costs. One of the biggest contributors to rising healthcare costs is the uninsured. Hospitals are businesses. Businesses exist to make money. When uninsured people come into the ER and can’t pay, the hospital is left with costs. Remember, they still have to pay doctors, technicians, laboratories, specialists, etc. Do the hospitals just eat these costs? No, they absorb them into their overall operational costs, which means higher bills for the insured. Sure you might not really see this, but the insurance companies do and now they need to recoup those costs by increasing your premiums.

When all that fails and the hospitals can’t recover costs? Now it’s a business loss, which means a tax write off and the costs are now passed on to the tax payers.

In other words, we all pay. I really think a “business man” like Mitt Romney would understand that, but apparently not. Instead Romney wants to go back to the disastrous system we had before, that was driving healthcare costs way up while driving the health of America way down.

Remember – Mitt Romney, taking America backwards!