Insured? You May Not Get the Best Trauma Care

If you have health insurance, you are less likely to be transferred from an emergency room to a trauma center for care than the uninsured.

A study conducted by 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. Insured patients taken to non-trauma hospitals were 13 to 15 percent less likely to be transferred to trauma centers than uninsured ones, the study showed.

The researchers analyzed data of more than 4,500 patients who were critically injured at 636 hospital emergency rooms across the United States.

Dr. M. Kit Delgado, an emergency care research scholar and the study’s lead author, said the problem may be related to insurance reimbursements, according to a press release obtained by HealthDay News:

“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. 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.”

Dr. Nancy Wang, the study’s senior author, said the findings are concerning:

“Finding disparities in quality of trauma care based on insurance is very disturbing. It is important for researchers to identify and call attention to these disparities in access to care and outcomes so that all people can receive the appropriate, high-quality care, regardless of their insurance status.”

The most common causes of death in the U.S. among people under 44 years of age are shootings and traffic accidents. Previous research has shown that severely injured patients are 2 percent less likely to die if treated at a top-ranked trauma center than at a non-trauma center.

Perhaps this is yet another reason to refuse to comply with Obamacare. What’s the point in paying for insurance at nearly four times the regular price and with outrageous deductibles, only to receive a lower standard of care if you are seriously injured?