Emergency Room Overutilization

Overuse of the emergency room is one of the main reasons for rising medical costs today. Because of non-emergency situations, most of the patients seen in the National Emergency Room are Medicaid recipients. The federal government launched the Medicaid Management Care program to provide better healthcare services, fully compensate healthcare providers and reduce healthcare costs. Medicaid Managed Care solved and solved these problems. The answer is "Yes" and "No". From the 1980's to the 1990's, Medicaid faced the challenge of surging Medicaid costs and an increase in uninsured.

"Everything about emergency medical problems is not an emergency," Elliot says, "We are using too much an emergency room, such as a medicine to compensate for colds and symptoms of influenza There is also people. "Emergency treatment is required, but this may occur in emergency treatment, all of which increase medical expenses and absorb resources that should be used for patients who actually need emergency treatment To do. When dealing with health problems, please take some time to consider whether the problem at hand is really an emergency. If in doubt please proceed to ER. If you can wait, please consult your PCP or visit the emergency medical center.

Some patients who are not enrolled in health insurance use ED as the main form of health management. As these patients do not use insurance or primary care, emergency care providers often face problems of abuse and financial loss (especially as many patients can not pay for medical expenses (see below) . Excessive use of ED creates annual $ 38 billion of waste (ie medical service and coordination failure, overtreatment, management complexity, price setting failure, and fraud) annually, unnecessarily consuming departmental resources, Decrease the quality of treatment for all patients. Abuse is not limited to non-insured, but the number of non-emergency emergency visits for uninsured is increasing - coverage improves access to other forms of medical care and by reducing the need for emergency visits Helps reduce overuse. A common misunderstanding is that frequent ED visitors are listed as a major factor in wasteful expenses.

For any disease, insured persons and non insured persons usually use the most expensive medical service in the emergency room. 95% of emergency treatment hospitals have an emergency room open 24 hours a day to provide treatment for emergency rooms and injured patients, and the emergency room is a family doctor of many people (Weiss & Lonnquist, 2000). Weiss and Lonnquist (2000) reported that the number of emergency room visits that were not covered in 1996 reached 93 million. In nearly half cases, there is no need for emergency treatment and those seeking treatment do not have the option of receiving regular doctors or other medical services.