The summary and headline are badly misleading. It sounds like shocking news, but what they really found is disappointing but not that surprising.<p>It's not half of US medical visits to <i>any kind of medical care</i> that are at emergency rooms. It is half of US medical visits to <i>hospitals</i> that are at emergency rooms.<p>That's a big difference. Among other things, they are not including visits to your family physician. If they included ordinary visits to your doctor outside of the hospital, then emergency rooms visits would be a much lower percentage.<p>Looking at the original abstract:<p><a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0020731417734498" rel="nofollow">http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0020731417734498</a><p>It says, "Our study aimed to determine the contribution of EDs to the health care received by Americans between 1996 and 2010 <i>and to compare it with</i> the contribution of outpatient and inpatient services using National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and National Hospital Discharge Survey databases."<p>They are comparing emergency visits to other kinds of hospital visits.
Just another report highlighting the need for change to our current healthcare system.<p>Although anecdotal, multiple family members who are health care providers in the ER (Nurse, PA, Doctor) it's more often than not far from an emergency ailment. This creates a scary supply and demand scenario.
Urgent Care facilities and walk-in clinics can fill the need for immediate, after-hours care at a far lower cost than the ER. Here's a screenshot from my health insurance provider, you can see it gives options along with a comparison of their cost: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/4Lqb7" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/4Lqb7</a>
This isn't that surprising. The cost of health care is so astronomical that many people WITH insurance refuse to go to a doctor until their condition is so bad they can't avoid it any longer, and then it's straight to the ER.
just a personal anecdote (i don't think that such situation affects any significant percentage of people though) - English words "urgent" and "emergency" translates to basically the same Russian word which means "emergency". Given that "urgent care" is missing in Russian medical system (at least 20 years back it was), we, being recent arrivals and thus not very skilled in both, English language and the details of US medical system, were going to "emergency" whenever told to go to "urgent care", and we were so disappointed that regular US doctors would refuse to see us except by appointment of some weeks/month in the future when an issue would require prompt attention, and they would be sending us to "emergency" instead (as it sounded to us when in reality it was urgent care). We thought that it is such an inefficient system - either appointment in 2 months or emergency room (where we'd wait 3-4 hours - obviously our issues weren't any close to priority there, and where we obviously wouldn't get a specialist attention which would better suit the issue we came with). Sometime later (after 6 years in US :) we did accidentally learn about urgent care.
Strangely, a study on whether providing expanded medicaid* would reduce emergency room visits seemed to suggest that it did not:<p>> It was widely believed that having insurance would encourage people to get routine medical care in doctors' offices or clinics, instead of waiting until they have more serious symptoms and have to head to the ER, where care is most expensive.<p>> The study's first findings, published a few years ago, showed that Medicaid was beneficial in many ways. It improved people's financial security. They went to the doctor when they were sick. And having the insurance correlated with a drop in rates of depression.<p>> But the study also found Medicaid enrollees increased their emergency room visits by 40 percent over the first 15 months.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/19/498526110/emergency-room-use-stays-high-in-oregon-medicaid-study" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/19/49852611...</a><p>edit: fixed medicare / medicaid
What I can't get is that my primary care doc makes me wait 6 weeks to get a checkup.<p>It seems like it doesn't take any more resources to take care of me next week then it does 6 weeks later.
Here's a nice graph[0] showing the relationship between income inequality and healthcare, and a good quote:<p>"The high-income group, with average household income greater than $70,000, is the standard to which all others are compared... 30 percent of the population in the $30,001–$50,000 range ...have 59 percent more mortality than is true of the richest group."<p>[0]: <a href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/21/2/31/F2.expansion.html" rel="nofollow">http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/21/2/31/F2.expansio...</a><p>Source: <a href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/21/2/31.full" rel="nofollow">http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/21/2/31.full</a>
Even with insurance, they implicitly encourage people to say everything is an "emergency" because otherwise you'd have to call them to get approval. But if you say "it was an emergency" you can avoid having to jump through hoops. So you go, and it clogs the emergency room, everyone pays more.
The disappointing part of the US medical system is it doesn’t do much for you unless you’re really seriously ill or about to die. If you’re about to die, it’s the best in the world. If you just eg have a shoulder pain or something — you will have great difficulty finding a competent doctor to deal with it. People discover this by their mid to late 30s, around the time they begin to have their first real health problems.
Well, what does one expect when the answer given by many when the topic of socialized medicine comes is "go to the emergency room, they can't turn you away for having no money"?