Who’s Really Overcrowding The ER?
If you think the overcrowding in emergency rooms across the country is because of the uninsured, think again.
A new study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine reports that of patients who are frequent users (over 4 times a year) of emergency departments (ED), the uninsured represent only 15 percent of those frequent users.
Also, the frequent ED users were more likely than occasional users to have visited a primary care physician in the previous year.
They also found that most patients who frequently use the ED have health insurance and the majority of users (60 percent) were white. These findings contradict the widely held assumption that frequent users are minorities or illegal immigrants without insurance. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*