Stanford Study: Uninsured Patients Get Better Care Than Insured

This example of the Law of Unintended Consequences should be no surprise to conservatives:

WASHINGTON (CBSDC) – According to a recent study, severely injured patients are less likely to be transferred to a trauma center if they have health insurance.

Researchers from the Stanford University of Medicine found that patients with insurance are less likely to get the best care than those who do not have insurance. They found that insured patients taken to non-trauma hospitals were 13 to 15 percent less likely to be transferred to trauma centers than uninsured ones.

“Insured patients may, ironically, get worse outcomes because they are taken care of at a center where there’s a lower volume of resource for critically injured patients,” Dr. M. Kit Delgado, a former Stanford emergency medicine instructor, and the study’s lead author said in a press release obtained by HealthDay News.

Researchers analyzed data of more than 4,500 patients who were critically injured at 636 hospital emergency rooms across the country.

We hypothesize that non-trauma center hospitals are more likely to want to admit insured patients presumably because they can get reimbursed for their services,” Delgado, who is now an emergency care research scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, added in the press release.

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