Don't blame the uninsured for emergency room visits

hilker:

“[A] study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in October 2008, says the uninsured are not responsible for crowded emergency rooms (emphasis mine):

‘The JAMA study also found that patients with public insurance, such as Medicaid and Medicare, are more likely to crowd into emergency rooms for minor complaints than are the uninsured. Only about 17 percent of E.R. visits in the United States in the last year studied were by uninsured patients, about the same as their share of the population.’

“Unsupported assumptions include the beliefs that uninsured patients are the main cause of emergency department overcrowding, that uninsured patients have less acute conditions than insured patients, and that uninsured patients use the ER mostly for convenience.

“We have a crisis in the emergency department and we have a crisis with the uninsured, but it is crucial that we do not assume that the latter is causing the former,” [Dr. Manya F.] Newton emphasized.

“If we attempt to solve emergency overcrowding by creating policies based on inaccurate assumptions, common knowledge, or what ‘everybody knows,’ we will waste limited resources, fail to address the root causes of the problem, and potentially increase the barriers to care faced by 47 million uninsured Americans,” Newton concluded.”“