E.R.’s Are Busy, but Fewer Patients Are Uninsured | Senator Eliot Shapleigh

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E.R.’s Are Busy, but Fewer Patients Are Uninsured
May 19, 2008

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.

Written by Nicholas Bakalar, The New York 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.

Dr. Ellen Weber, the lead author of the study and a professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, cited another reason for the crowds. “E.R.’s,” she said, “are boarding patients for hours, and sometimes for days, before the hospital can find them a bed.”

The authors acknowledge that their sample did not include children, and that it may underrepresent homeless people.

To see study data detailing types of insurance held by emergency room patients, see the chart below:

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