9 People, 6 Years, 2678 ER Visits
I hope this is an April Fool’s joke:
In the past six years, eight people from Austin and one from Luling racked up 2,678 emergency room visits in Central Texas, costing hospitals, taxpayers and others $3 million. One of the nine spent more than a third of last year in the ER: 145 days. That same patient totaled 554 ER visits from 2003 through 2008.
All nine speak English; three are homeless; five are women whose average age is 40, and four are men whose average age is 50. Seven have a mental health diagnosis and eight have a drug abuse diagnosis.
900 frequent users — people who visited an ER six or more times in three months — had 2,123 preventable visits in 2007, or 18 percent of 11,600 total visits to Central Texas ERs, which cost more than $2 million. Among those picking up the bill were hospitals and taxpayers, including government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
In a report last year, Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services said that 10 patients made up more than 1 percent of the system’s 130,000 contacts with patients in two years. The patients’ most common ailments were stomach or chest pains, injuries or respiratory problems.
(Via Socialized Medicine.)
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