Thursday, May 20, 2010

The Uninsured Don’t Overuse the ER — Medicaid Patients Do…

USA Today has a story this morning about a new report released by the Centers for Disease Control regarding emergency room visits in 2007.  While conventional wisdom suggests that emergency rooms spend most of their time treating uninsured patients, the study once again confirmed that the uninsured DON’T visit the ER the most often – patients with Medicaid do.  Specifically, more than 30% of Medicaid patients under 65 visited the ER at least once in 2007, compared to fewer than 20% of both uninsured patients and patients with private insurance.  And Medicaid patients were more than twice as likely as the uninsured to visit the ER at least twice in that year – more than one in seven (15%) Medicaid patients under 65 made multiple ER trips, compared to only 7% of the uninsured and 5% with private insurance.  As an ER physician quoted in the article noted, “High Medicaid utilization [of the ER] is no surprise; many patients have difficulty finding primary care providers who take Medicaid, so the ER is the only alternative.”

With 16 million more Americans set to obtain their health “coverage” (if they can find it) under Medicaid as a result of the health care overhaul, how will emergency rooms cope if many – or even some – of these patients utilize the ER as their primary source of treatment?  And how does adding more people into a broken Medicaid system constitute “reform?”