Emergency room visits soar in California, report finds

All around California, emergency room visits among low-income patients are soaring.

A new state report showed that during the first few months of 2016, about 1.5 million people on Medi-Cal visited the emergency room compared to about 700,000 in late 2012.

ER doctors on the Central Coast said their hospitals are already packed and the new health care bill may drive up the numbers.

“Our busiest day, we saw 216 patients, I think. Last week, we saw 195. So, on average, we see about 56,000 patients a year and that’s a dramatic increase. By comparison in 2010, we saw about 43,000 patients,” said Dr. Sameer Bakhta with Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.

Health care experts said Medi-Cal allows patients to seek affordable treatments.

“Through Medi-Cal, low-income people can access preventive services. They can access, you know, specialty care. They can see a cardiologist. They can get access to life-saving prescription drugs,” said Amy Adams, senior program officer at California Healthcare Foundation.

But for many, finding a provider and getting an appointment can take weeks, if not months.

“We really do see a lot of folks who are really making the effort to try and get into their primary care doctor. Somebody who’s sick and maybe have a cough or a cold, and says, ‘Hey, I called my doctor and they said see they’d see me in three months.’ Well, that doesn’t really help if you are sick today,” Bakhta said.

As more people turn to the ER, some doctors are turned off by cost of living on the Central Coast.

“We are an expensive place to live. When you’ve got folks that are dealing with hundreds of thousands of medical school debt, and they are coming to a place where sometimes it’s quite hard to keep your doors open,” Bakhta said.

Now, doctors are even more worried about what the new health care bill may have in store.

“When you are talking about cutting $800 billion for Medicaid and cutting insurance for 24 million people, what’s going to happen is what we had before the Affordable Care Act, which was a lot of people without insurance, who came to the emergency department before because no one would see them,” Bakhta said.

Experts said without sufficient federal funding, California could be forced to make some very difficult decisions. Those with Medi-Cal will be affected the most in terms of the services they would be able to access.