A lot of these people end up in the ER because they don’t have any health insurance at all. But that’s well outside the scope of the “issue” the health insurance company describes in the article. I have had friends and family who had to be dragged to the ER because they didn’t think their situation was enough of an “emergency” but it absolutely was: chest pains were a heart attack in progress and a fever with a stiff neck was a pretty serious infection, for example.
How many legitimate emergencies vs “non-emergencies” will be discouraged from receiving ER treatment? I suspect legitimate emergency treatment foregone will be larger (and represent a significantly larger cost savings to the health plan) at the expense of our collective long-term health and well-being.
Simple non-technical solution: Build a regular urgent care facility next to the ER and shunt the non-emergency people to it.
Doesn't sound like those are the kind of patients this insurer is concerned about? Or is it?
And many people with drug or mental health issues also have successful careers and private insurance plans.
So UHC does pay many of those bills.
aside from the homeless, what about all the people making minimum wage who neither qualify for medicaid, nor work enough to get employer supplied insurance?
sometimes the head in the sand attitude here is fucking sickening
People making a minimum wage or who are minimally employed can qualify for lower cost affordable healthcare insurance through the ACA. It’s available, whether people take advantage is up to them. I know someone who pays less for their ACA plan than they do for their mobile and Internet services.
Where the ACA fails is more at the middle class family level. That is where the income vs. family plan costs tend to be out of balance.
I swear I won't really know when I've actually had a heart attack because I've been faked out too many times by GERD reactions.
I've gone about 6 times to ER for it over the past five years, and probably stayed home another ~20 times. Each time I decided to go it's been nothing.
I've driven myself to the ER each time, though, even if maybe I shouldn't, so that saved a little money. Helps that a hospital is only 5 minutes away.
I am finally getting an endoscopy soon, maybe it'll discover something treatable.
She's also very much an overprotective parent in a lot of other ways, and I can't help but think the hypochondriac part stems from that.
I got injured (not too bad) and went to urgent care - my wait time was about 10 minutes. It costs me nothing, seems like a good system that would catch a lot of these borderline ER cases we hear about.
In my case, my insurer runs the hospital so it seems like they have an incentive to keep costs reasonable. But maybe, if you're a hospital and you are running numbers on adding ER or Urgent Care you default more to ER since you know you can just bill the insurance 10% over cost (or whatever) no matter what.
Have any of the people quoted been in an ER? Even accepting the premise that hospital prices are outrageous for ER visits, walk into any hospital and it should be clear that a lot of the patient population is not there for an "emergency". In the US, the ER acts as a catch all for what often should be handled by social services (some of which don't exist). Drug seeking patients, homeless patients, and patients with mental health issues very often end up in the ER.