Emergency Room (E.R.) Services Still Overused Despite Access to Obamacare

While emergency rooms are known for being busy, new national research shows the level of patients in the five most populous states does not vary widely -- though they make up more than one-third of all emergency room visits in the United States. UPI reports that according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the number of Americans who visit the emergency room each year -- about one in five -- has remained relatively unchanged in recent years. Emergency room visits increased for years because of non-emergency visits due to a lack of options for healthcare, Those visits were based either on a lack of insurance preventing someone from going to a regular doctor, because hours were not convenient to them, or because of a lack of some other health information. The Affordable Care Act was expected to lower the number of emergency room visits people take. However, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians, a 2015 study showed many were still going to the ER as the annual number of visits continued to increase--even though many can now pay using insurance.