A recent study finds that children who are covered by a private insurance plan get more care in the emergency room than do kids who are covered by a public form of health insurance, or who are uninsured. What type of health insurance coverage does your child have?
In September of 2011, a survey was done that included over 100 doctors who worked in emergency departments. The survey was conducted by a group called Truth on Call for msnbc.com. Out of the 100 doctors in the survey, 84 of them said that they had given (or would give) extra attention to a patient who was “influential”.
Who would be considered “influential”? The list would include people who are famous, people who have donated large sums of money to the hospital, and the family members of the financial donors. The VIPs are getting the same quality of care as everyone else, but their waiting time before being seen is significantly less. This establishes that ERs will treat some adult patients differently than others.
A new study was published in the Journal of Pediatrics. It was done by researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston. The data for this survey came from an analysis of emergency department visits that were recorded in the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. The data is from 1999-2008. It includes around 33,000 annual visits to the emergency room.
The study found that kids who are covered by public health insurance, (such as Medicaid or CHIP), and kids who were uninsured, are at least 22% less likely to receive testing or to undergo procedures when they visit the emergency room, (when compared to kids who are covered by private health insurance). Children who have no health insurance coverage are less likely to receive any medication, when compared with kids who had either public or private insurance.
It also found that kids who had been diagnosed with a serious illness have the same odds of being admitted to the hospital no matter what their health insurance status happened to be. It didn’t matter.
The authors of the study had a few explanations about why this is happening. Kids who have private insurance are 11 times more likely to have a primary care doctor than are uninsured children. Kids with private health insurance are 3 times more likely to have a primary care doctor than are kids who are covered by public health insurance.
This means that the kids with private insurance are arriving at the ER after being referred by their doctor, who has specific instructions about the care the child needs to receive. The researchers also think that it is possible that the parents of the kids who have public health insurance, or no health insurance, request less testing and treatment because they are concerned about the cost.
Image by Taber Andrew Bain on Flickr