CFCE Blog

Uninsured Not Crowding Emergency Rooms

By Loren Kaye
Posted 5/07/2008

According to a recent study reported in the New York Times, between 1995 and 2004, the proportion of uninsured persons using emergency rooms decreased, even as the uninsured population rose.  According to the Times:

It is often said that emergency rooms are crowded because of the disproportionate number of uninsured people using them. But data based on telephone surveys and in-person interviews, published on April 14 in The Annals of Emergency Medicine, tell a different story. The number of uninsured people nationwide rose to 15.7 percent in 2004 from 15.4 percent in 1995. Yet in that period, the proportion of uninsured people using emergency rooms declined.

The 26 percent increase in the number of visits in the period was largely caused by an increase in the number of people with private doctors who sought emergency room care.

The authors suggest several reasons, among them an aging population, a growing number of time-sensitive medical treatments that can be performed only in an E.R., complications from medical and surgical treatments and the difficulty of obtaining a timely appointment with a private physician.

The Times did not note that during that same time period, the proportion of patients insured by Medicaid increased their use of emergency rooms.  This buttresses a study by the California Healthcare Foundation that found that communities with high levels of uninsured and noncitizen residents do not have higher levels of ED use.

Comments There are 0 comments

Add Comment
Note: Your comment is important to us. The CFCE website does not force you to logon to add a comment; therefore, to protect the integrity of our website, we do have an approval process. Your comment may not be visible immediately.
Screen Name
Comment (500 characters max.)