One of the earliest - and most popular - parts of the Affordable Care Act allowed young adults to stay on their parents insurance until their 26th birthday. This week, Stanford researchers led by Tina Hernandez-Boussard, PhD, published a paper in the journal Health Affairs that tracked emergency room visits in California, New York and Florida for two age groups: 19 to 25 year olds - the group affected by the new requirement - and 26 to 31 year olds for comparison. The researchers examined ER visits for the two years prior to the ACA requirement (2009 and 2010) and one year after the requirement went into effect (2011). Their findings showed that in 2011, 19- to 25-year-olds had slightly fewer ER visits - 2.7 per 1,000 people -compared to the older group.
The researchers calculated that the drop in ER use means more than 60,000 fewer visits for 19- to 26-year-olds across the three states in 2011. They also found that the largest relative decreases in ER use were among women and blacks.
A post on Washington Post's Wonkblog covered the study and discussed further findings:
The researchers had another finding that seems just as important. While the total number of ER visits among the under-26 group was down, about the same number of people still went to the ER. The distinction here is that young adults with chronic conditions, who have greater care needs, probably now had better access to non-ER care settings, so their number of visits to the ER decreased. But the finding also suggests that healthy young adults, who might have shunned health insurance before, still continued to see the ER as a place for seeking out routine care, according to the study. Further, insurance likely makes those ER visits cheaper, which could actually increase how much people use the ER, the researchers wrote.
Hernandez-Boussard and her colleagues concluded in their paper, "As EDs face capacity challenges, it is important to consider how to meet the broad underlying needs of young adults through other channels and ensure the needed availability of these alternative health services."
Previously: Abraham Verghese on health-law battle: “We’ve worried so much about the process, not the patient"
Photo by Eric Staszczak/KOMU
