ObamaCanard #93: Uninsured Folks Who Use Emergency Rooms for Primary Care Drive Up Costs for Everyone

How often have you read news reports like this one in the San Francisco Chronicle?

Hospital emergency departments, typically the medical providers of last resort, are becoming the only option for insured as well as uninsured people who are unable to get care elsewhere, leading to a record rise in emergency room visits over the past decade, a federal government report found...

"The uninsured have long been more frequent users of (emergency rooms). That's not new. What's new is the rise ... in frequency in visits, and that's occurring in the insured," said Dr. Stephen Pitts, author of the report and a CDC fellow who teaches emergency medicine at Emory University's School of Medicine.

Problem is, the meme is complete bunk.

As Robert J. Samuelson, writing in The Washington Post, and The New York Times' Freakonomics Blog report:

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was "more convenient" to go to the emergency room or they couldn't "get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed." If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.

And:

...a new Slate article from Zachary Meisel and Jesse Pines offers a rosier picture of emergency room usage, and dispels several pervasive myths. They write that E.R. care represents less than 3 percent of healthcare spending, only 12 percent of E.R. visits are non-urgent, and the majority of E.R. patients are insured U.S. citizens, not uninsured, illegal immigrants. Meisel and Pines also point out that E.R. visits don’t necessarily cost more than primary care visits: “In fact, the marginal cost of treating less acute patients in the ER is lower than paying off-hours primary care doctors, as ERs are already open 24/7 to handle life-threatening emergencies.” Ultimately, Meisel and Pines believe that emergency rooms are functioning as they’re supposed to, as “an always-available resource to alleviate pain, make sure your baby is not truly ill, and patch you up after a nasty fall is vital, even if it turns out that your condition wasn’t as serious as you feared.”

Put simply, E.R.'s are functioning far better in the U.S. than in any other country.

Which is why Alan Grayson wants to destroy them. And, it would seem, kill you in the process.

In fact, the reason E.R. usage has grown is because of government-run health care. Most studies indicate that the difficulty in getting primary care appointments (especially for Medicare and Medicaid patients) has contributed to the rise in E.R. use.

So, if Democrats get their way with state-run health care for everyone, look for Emergency Rooms to resemble a DMV chock full of sick people.