Study: Uninsured patients not cause of ED overcrowding
Patient Safety Monitor Alert, November 12, 2008
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University of Michigan Professor Manya F. Newton, MD, MPH, recently performed a comprehensive literature review to investigate the claim that uninsured patients often visit the emergency department (ED) for nonurgent care, reports American Medical News. However, Newton found that most of these claims were unfounded and started to pop up in the early 1990s with the passage of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which says that all emergency patients must be treated even if they can't pay for their care.
On the contrary, EDs are becoming too crowded for a number of different reasons: more patients are admitted with many ailments, a lack of hospitals and beds due to facilities' budget cuts, and an increase in the amount of patients who want immediate care, as opposed to waiting to see their primary care physicians (PCP). Some other commonly held beliefs revealed by the literature review turned out to be true; uninsured patients do visit the ED because of a lack of access to a PCP, the article says.
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