At least that's what the Heritage Foundation said.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2007/12/The-Crisis-in-Americas-Emergency-Rooms-and-What-Can-Be-DoneCheck it out. This is where HCR came from.
"....Emergency medicine encompasses the care of patients with traumatic injuries or serious signs and symptoms of disease. Quick evaluation and rapid treatment of these patients obviously cannot be done on an "elective" basis. These services are invariably provided under the auspices of a hospital and are available to patients 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Moreover, hospital emergency departments (EDs) are the only part of the health care system that is required by federal law to provide care to all patients, regardless of ability to pay.<1> A sizable number of patients who visit the ED do not require the level of care that an emergency room provides. In Maryland, for example, patients with non-urgent medical problems account for over 40 percent of ED visits.<2>
Jammed with increasing numbers of uninsured Americans and enrollees in public programs, emergency rooms find their overcrowding further aggravated by outdated federal and state policies. Worse, while many emergency rooms are already operating at peak capacity on a day-to-day basis, the emergency medical system is incapable of absorbing the massive surge in demand for emergency medical assistance that would follow a natural disaster or terrorist attack....
....Step #1: Rapidly expand private health coverage to include the uninsured.
The first step in reforming the emergency medical system is to reduce its inappropriate use by patients who could safely be seen elsewhere. For example, growing numbers of uninsured Americans frequently lack regular primary care, and the ED often fills the gap. Covering the uninsured for non-emergent care-if done correctly-is an essential element of emergency medical reform and would certainly help to reduce the strain on the system. Patients would then be more likely to receive regular care (including preventive services), have less need for the ED, and avoid costly hospital admissions.
The data indicate that simply moving the uninsured into public programs such as Medicaid and SCHIP might not solve the ED demand crisis and could even exacerbate the problem. According to a recent National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, patients with Medicaid as the expected source of payment used hospital emergency departments in 2004 at nearly twice the rate of the uninsured and at four times the rate of the privately insured. Moreover, more ED visits by Medicaid and SCHIP patients (35.7 percent) were classified as non-urgent or semi-urgent than were visits by self-paying patients (23.7 percent).<39>
The number of Medicaid-eligible patients who initially present to the emergency department as uninsured and are eventually converted to Medicaid is unknown, but it is not likely to be large enough to have any significant effect on the data reported in the NHAMCS study.<40> However, a major cause of these disparities is probably the lack of a sufficient number of primary care doctors available to Medicaid patients. This is likely a natural response to Medicaid's very low physician reimbursement rates in many states.
Thus, the most effective way to reduce inappropriate ED utilization is to institute sound "premium support" programs that would enable Medicaid patients to purchase quality private health insurance coverage with better access to care. The right policy is to integrate the working uninsured population and non-disabled Medicaid and SCHIP beneficiaries into a reformed private health insurance market....."
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