Children’s Health Insurance Status and Emergency Room Utilization: An Examination of Complex Survey Data

Abstract

Since the Children’s Health Insurance Program’s passage into law in 1997, the program has increased in cost to over $15 billion in recent years. Emergency room usage has also increased throughout the United States, leading to nationwide issues in overcrowding and surges in service costs. This study seeks to examine emergency room utilization of children insured under Children’s Health Insurance Program to determine if Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollees use the emergency room more or less frequently than their privately insured counterparts. The data used in this study were from the 2017 National Health Interview Survey. SAS statistical software was used to conduct a multinomial regression assessing the relationship between insurance type (private v. Children’s Health Insurance Program) and frequency of emergency room utilization over the last 12 months. The analysis results indicate no statistically significant difference between Children’s Health Insurance Program insured and privately insured children in terms of frequency of emergency room utilization and suggest a need to explore other factors that more directly influence Children’s Health Insurance Program costs.

A multinational survey of patient utilization of and value conveyed through virtual symptom triage and healthcare referral

“…The average cost of treating primary care conditions in an emergency department in the US is $530–2,032 ( 2 , 3 ). In comparison, a visit with the same clinical presentation to a primary care physician's office or an urgent care center costs $167 or $193, respectively ( 2 , 4 ). At the other end of the spectrum of clinical severity, patients with clinical conditions requiring immediate acute care who might not seek appropriate emergent care based on uninformed self-assessment and generic information available on the internet, represent a risk of avoidable serious morbidity, poor clinical outcomes and utilization of a level of care acuity in excess of that which would have been required if the patient had sought and received less acute care earlier ( 5 , 6 ).…”