A study found that adults who had a change in their health insurance status were more likely to use the emergency department than were adults who had stable insurance coverage. This is one of those studies that confirms what common sense would have one believe. Even so, it’s nice to have some data that backs up what many of us suspected was true anyway.
Every so often, I come across a health insurance related study that makes me question why it was done in the first place. This is especially true when a study does little more than attach a set of statistical data to what most people would reasonably assume to be true.
For example, in 2011, a study was done that concluded that having health insurance helps people who are low-income, or poor. Of course it does!
My best guess is that these types of studies are necessary so that there is some scientifically gathered and evaluated evidence that proves that, for example, poor people are helped by having health insurance, rather than not having it. Maybe the study can be used to counter arguments from legislators who feel that, I don’t know, Medicaid, doesn’t actually help anyone, (so that the legislator can cut the funding the program receives).
It troubles me that we live in a country where these “common sense” studies are required to defend the neediest Americans from the greediest ones. I’d much rather believe that we live in a country where people instinctively do the right thing, especially when it comes to health care coverage. Instead, we have studies that can be used to help people who lack a conscience to step away from political gamesmanship for a moment in order to help fellow Americans who need health care coverage and who have no means of affording it. But, I digress.
A new study, that was published in the “Archives of Internal Medicine”, found that adults who have had a change in their health insurance coverage were more likely to use the emergency room than were adults who did not have any changes to their health insurance status.
This, too, is something that I believe most of us could have guessed. If you lose your health insurance, you have little choice but to avoid getting the health care that you need, until it becomes so dire that you end up in an emergency room. If you recently got health insurance, then you might have been one of the unfortunate few who was in the ER in the past few months, before your coverage kicked in.
The researchers found that 20.7% of insured adults, and 20% of uninsured adults, had at least one visit to the ER in the past 12 months. Out of the group that was insured, 29.5% of the adults who were newly insured had at least one visit to the ER in the past year, while only 20.2% of the adults who had continuous insurance coverage did.
What about the adults who had no health insurance coverage at all? 25.7% of the adults who had no health insurance, and then became newly insured, had at least one trip to the ER. Only 18.6% of adults who were lucky enough to have continuous health insurance coverage went to the ER in the past year.
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