Medicaid patients use hospital emergency rooms more frequently than privately insured and uninsured patients but are not overusing or abusing ER services.

So says the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) in a recent report that contradicts the widely held belief that Medicaid patients abuse hospital ER services.

According to “Revisiting Emergency Department Use in Medicaid,” “Higher ED use among Medicaid enrollees is explained mostly by the higher rates and more severe cases of chronic disease and disability they experience relative to those who are privately insured and uninsured.”

In addition, MACPAC found, “High ED use also can be a sign of poor access to primary, specialty, dental, and outpatient mental health care in other settings.”  In 2012, for example, “…about one in four adult Medicaid enrollees who reported a recent visit to the ED went there because of difficulty accessing another provider, not because of a serious health problem.”

MACPAC also concluded that “The majority of ED visits by non-elderly Medicaid patients are for urgent symptoms and serious medical problems that require prompt medical attention…Non-urgent visits account for just 10 percent of all Medicaid-covered ED visits for non-elderly patients, a proportion comparable to that of privately insured patients.”

Private safety-net hospitals serve far more Medicaid patients than the typical acute-care hospital and therefore face far greater challenges in meeting these patients’ needs.

Learn more about MACPAC’s findings in “Revisiting Emergency Department Use in Medicaid,” which can be found here.