Expanding Medicaid Might Cut ER Visits.

• Position: EMERGENCY CARE

Expanding Medicaid could reduce visits to a hospital's emergency unit for conditions that could be treated in a doctor's office, according to a Texas A&M University and University of South Carolina study. Hospital emergency departments provide lifesaving care for millions of people each year. However, around one-third of emergency visits are for conditions that are not emergencies or for conditions that are preventable.

Research has found that a lack of health insurance coverage plays a role in whether a person seeks emergency care, and the expansions of state Medicaid programs through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could have affected emergency visits. However, research has not been fully conclusive and the understanding of how Medicaid expansions affect different types of emergency visits remains unclear.

Benjamin Ukert, assistant professor at the A&M School of Public Health, and colleagues studied outpatient emergency visits between 2011-17, focusing on two states that have expanded Medicaid (New York and Massachusetts) and two states that have not (Georgia and Florida). They analyzed data on more than 80,000,000 emergency visits by 26,000,000 people between the ages of 18 and 64 during the study period.

The researchers measured total emergency visits and emergency visits broken down into five categories of medical urgency: not preventable and injury-related...