Don't Believe the Emergency-Room Laments

Is It Illegal Immigrants?

Actually, if you think that increased illegal immigration is responsible for the increases in ER use, you would most likely be wrong. The percentage of people going to the ER with no insurance has been steady over the past 10 years, until 2006 when it went up 0.6%. This increase may be symptomatic of problems with overall health insurance coverage, more than anything else.

What it does show is that this small percentage is hiding a massive 37% increase in the uninsured attending ER, some 5.5 million additional visits, and someone somewhere is paying for that. There is insufficient detail to indicate whether an individual actually paid the hospital fees or not, but this represents an enormous burden of expense not covered by insurance.

Waiting and Service Times

If you believed what you read in the papers or heard on the television, you might be forgiven for thinking that you would need to take a copy of 'War and Peace' with you to read. Although the average waiting time to see a physician in the ER is 56 minutes, this is affected by outliers -- some people wait a very long time to be seen.

Perhaps a better measurement would be the 31 minutes that the majority of people are waiting and the 62% who are seen within one hour, although the percentage of those seen within an hour is declining.

In the 1997 report, the average waiting time was 38 minutes, but the maximum time measured was capped, so this is misleading to compare. Despite the service times, every year, 2% of people who come to the ER just don't wait to be seen.