Most Emergency Room Visits Are Not Used For Emergencies
People are often visiting emergency rooms for ailments that are not emergencies at all. The reason for that is because public hospitals cannot turn down patients whether they have money, or health insurance. Another reason is because they are open 24 hours and patients that do have medical insurance know they do not have to make an appointment at a doctors office. Simply, they have to see the patient. Fifty five percent of the 90 million visits to emergency rooms were completely unnecessary in 1996. Today that number has risen significantly because of the failing economy, lack of health insurance, and high immigration rates. The 57 percent of patients that visit the ER are on Medicaid and only 8 percent of those on Medicaid are in need of true emergency care. The NHSR says that 84.1 percent of ER visits In total were semi urgent to non urgent. It is unclear what the definition of urgent is to emergency room staff. A broken arm is not life threatening, however it is not clear if this is considered as urgent, semi urgent, or non urgent. Regardless, the claim is that because over 80 percent of emergency room visits are not for life threatening treatment, it is clogging up the health care system and costing billions of dollars in healthcare.
Stitches may not be life threatening and a thread and needle costs only a few dollars, however a typical emergency room will bill the patient or his health insurance company almost a thousand dollars for using their services. Since most people in the ER has medicaid, that cost goes right back out of the pockets of the tax payers. As well, not having medical insurance does not prevent people from visiting emergency rooms, whether it is a life threatening emergency or not. In some countries, an emergency room visit will require cash or health insurance up front! However even in those countries, emergency room visits are at an all time high. Why? Because in those countries, an ER visit costs about the same, possibly even cheaper than seeing a physician at a medical facility. Contradicting in America, emergency room visits are way more likely than waiting out for that appointment to a primary care physician, despite the costs. One ER physician, who wishes to remain nameless, reported that non physician emergency care succeeded at least 95 percent of the time. These latest studies have resulted in many campaigns to completely reform health insurance, as well as emergency room policies.
