If you’re injured in a car accident, your next stop could be a trauma center. But what if that service weren’t available. It’s a situation we could soon face right here in the Upstate. Trauma centers are losing millions of dollars, which could leave people like you paying the ultimate price.

Hopefully, you will never need the services of a trauma center. If you do, state lawmakers have taken the first step to formalize a system that’s now a web of hospitals. The Senate Medical Affairs Committee passed the Statewide Trauma Act on Wednesday. Its purpose is to save the trauma centers you rely on to save your life.

David Allen doesn’t remember the car accident that put him in the hospital. When he woke up he was a change man physically and emotionally.

David says, “Now, I actually don’t know if I’ll ever work again.”

David arrived at the Greenville Hospital System’s trauma center literally a broken man. Aorta, liver, lungs, spleen, and hip mangled. He owes his life to the doctors and the nurses.

He says, “During the surgeries I died twice, and I’m still alive, everything put back together.”

But trauma centers are in need of saving too.

Dr. Richard Roettger says, “We historically take care of a lot of people who aren’t insured or people who are underinsured.”

Dr. Richard Roettger says that why the Statewide Trauma Act is so important. It could evidentially open the door to funding state trauma centers need to continue to save patients just like David.

The Statewide Trauma Act now goes to the full senate. Hospitals participate in the trauma system on a voluntary basis. Already two hospitals have already dropped out…one in Aiken and the other in Georgetown. Currently, taxpayers don’t support trauma centers.