Illegal immigrants don’t overuse emergency room; Medi-cal patients do
August 21st, 2008, 6:00 am · Post a Comment · posted by Erin Carlyle
Immigrants — particularly those here illegally — are often blamed for overcrowding hospital emergency rooms and driving up the cost of health care for citizens.

But a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California says that foreign-born residents who are not U.S. citizens are among the least likely to use emergency rooms, at least for those health issues that could be treated in a clinic.

More specifically, immigrant Hispanics and Asians use emergency departments less than U.S.-born whites, the report found. Noncitizen immigrants are among the least likely to report a recent emergency department visit, according to the study.

The most likely people to use emergency rooms are Medi-Cal patients, according to the report.

Here are the major findings of the new PPIC report:

The uninsured are nearly twice as likely to visit the emergency department as the privately insured but far less likely than Medi-Cal or Medicare patients.
Children under 18 account for a quarter of emergency department visits.
Infants have the highest proportion – nearly seven in 10 – of potentially avoidable emergency department visits.
Medicare patients are frequent emergency room visitors, but fewer than three in 10 visits by patients over 65 were considered avoidable.
The three counties with the highest per-capita emergency department visit rate are in the Central Valley: Stanislaus, Fresno, and San Joaquin.
However, the report does not address the fact that people in California illegally are eligible for Medi-Cal, as we’ve reported before.

As of February 2007, 12 percent of the state’s 6.6 million Medi-Cal eligible patients were considered illegal immigrants. Medi-Cal officials count as illegal immigrants people who can provide neither a Social Security number nor immigration papers.

The study was funded by the California Program on Access to Care, a University of California research program created at the behest of the California legislature 10 years ago. The Public Policy Institute of California is nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that does not take stances on poltical issues.

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