It’s rewarding to see Swedish closing one of their stand-alone emergency rooms (ER) — the Issaquah facility.

These ERs drain insurance resources and the consumers who must buy their policies.

Hospitals use stand-alone ER’s to attract good-paying patients with insurance. It’s about marketing and gaining share, and little about improving the quality of health care.

These ER’s have millions of dollars tied up in specialists, imaging, laboratories and other capital.  ER services are duplicated at hospitals and outpatient imaging centers.

Evergreen Hospital is a sorry example of this excess. Evergreen Hospital is using millions of taxpayer levy monies to finance their new hospital ER. Evergreen’s “public records official” reports they don’t have occupancy data, but it’s known in the community the emergency department is operating at below 60 percent capacity.

Yet, when Evergreen found out Swedish was moving into Redmond to capture the plateau business they rushed in to expanding Evergreen Medical Clinic/Redmond to include an ER.

The system is broken. Kudos to Overlake for not getting sucked into ER marketing. I find their 24/7 Urgent Care service an excellent alternative for most health needs in our family.

Is there anyone out there who couldn’t live without a free-standing ER?

Bob Yoder, Redmond