"The study shows that only a little more than half of all emergency department charges are paid and that these payments continue to spiral downwards," said Rita K. Cydulka, M.D., one of the study's co-authors, who is an associate professor at CWRU and an emergency physician at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland. "Declining payment rates increasingly threaten the ability of emergency departments to provide emergency care to all regardless of ability to pay."
Based on data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, a nationally representative survey of the U.S. population conducted by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the researchers determined that, from 1996 to 1998, the rate of payment for emergency department charges declined from 60 percent to 53 percent.
The largest decline in payments was observed among the privately insured, whose payments decreased from 75 percent of charges to 63 percent. Payment rates by Medicaid, Medicare, and the uninsured remained relatively stable during this time period.
"Our findings question the common misperception that the uninsured are solely responsible for the financial crisis facing many emergency departments," said Alexander Tsai, a fourth-year CWRU medical student enrolled in the AHRQ-funded dual degree program in medicine and health services research and lead author of the study. "The good news for emergency departments is that, on the whole, the uninsured paid for a surprisingly large proportion of th
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Contact: George Stamatis
gxs18@po.cwru.edu
216-368-3635
Case Western Reserve University
26-Feb-2003