Emergency Room Overcrowding Not Caused by Uninsured

Dan Frith

Contributor

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I hope you have not recently found the need to visit your local emergency room.  One of my family members was not so lucky - she had fairly significant symptoms and waited for over 6 hours before being seen by a triage nurse! Pretty outrageous isn't it!  You would think we lived in a third world country.

However, when I engaged my friends in a discussion over these events, they all pointed to the uninsured using the local emergency room as their family doctor's office as the cause of the problem.  If true, the situation still screams out for a better system, but...it doesn't appear to be true!

A new study from the University of California, San Francisco reveals that not only is the overcrowding not caused by the uninsured flocking to the local hospital, it is also not explained by patients who are there for nonurgent care.  It is explained by hospitals allocating too few doctors and nurses to their emergency departments.

My take:  Hospitals' profit margin for emergency care is not what it is for speciality care like neurosurgery, cardiac and vascular surgery, transplant procedures, etc..