Doc on Glenn Beck Show sheds new light on ER visits
Saturday, October 17, 2009 at 10:41AM 
Democrats stress costs associated with emergency room visits, making the idea a linchpin in the public option debate. But on Friday a physician appearing on the Glenn Beck show’s special feature ‘Obamacare, A Second Opinion,’ mentioned a report about ER visits. That seldom-cited report was issued by the U.S. government, and findings are more complicated than public option fans admit. According to the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “ER visits [are] mostly by Medicare, Medicaid Recipients.”
Released in July, but overlooked by media, the report on emergency room visits disclosed: “An estimated 50 million, or 42 percent, of the 120 million visits made in 2006 to U.S. hospital emergency departments were billed to the Medicaid and Medicare programs, according to a U.S. government report released Thursday.”
Results on the uninsured reflect numbers suggesting they do use ER more frequently than other groups, but even those numbers are less staggering than commonly believed.
Uninsured patients accounted for nearly 18 percent of emergency department visits nationally, 34 percent were billed to private insurance, and 6 percent were billed to worker's compensation, military health plan administrator Tricare, and other payers, according to the latest News and Numbers from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Among the other findings:
•Of the 24.2 million emergency department visits billed to Medicare, 38.3 percent ended with the patients being admitted, compared with 11.2 percent of the 41.5 million visits billed to private insurers, 9.5 percent of the 26 million visits billed to Medicaid, and 6.8 percent of the 21.2 million visits by the uninsured.
•Uninsured patients were the most frequent users of hospital emergency departments. Their rate of 452 visits per 1,000 people was 1.2 times greater than the rate of 367 per 1,000 people among patients with public or private insurance.
•The "treat-and-release" rate for uninsured patients was 421 visits per 1,000 people, compared with 301 visits per 1,000 for those with insurance. This is a possible indication that people without insurance use hospital emergency departments as their usual source of care.
The study is based on an analysis of data from the 2006 Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, which contains records of emergency department visits from about 1,000 community hospitals nationwide. The hospitals account for 20 percent of all U.S. hospital emergency departments.
A number of the physicians appearing on Beck’s show suggested adding a public option in addition to Medicare and Medicaid will reduce the availability and quality of healthcare.
[Text and graphic from the National Institutes of Health; minor editing by Kay B. Day at The US Report.]
Reader Comments (2)
Emergency Room care is still extraordinarily expensive, even if so many are turned away. The fact that a large number of patients are still denied care does not help much.
Frankly, much of the opposition to the public option strikes me as self-contradictory.
Burr, thanks. This is pretty much a straight-up news piece pulled directly from US government data. And I agree with you on the self-contradict position--the dire fiscal implosions known as Medicarea and Medicaid defy the government's own projections.