The largest-ever study on the effects of health care co-payment costs on emergency department visits has revealed that requiring patients to pay for a portion of the cost can reduce the number of visits. The study also finds that this decrease does not negatively affect health.
?The results of this study are encouraging in that these modest co-payments appeared to reduce health care use, and therefore overall costs, without harming patients,? says Dr. John Hsu, lead author of the study.
While emergency visit rates decrease substantially as the co-payment increases, the findings show no increase in the rate of unfavorable clinical events (hospitalization, intensive care admission) and no increase in deaths. The study appears in the latest issue of Health Services Research.
The population-based experiment followed over two million commercially insured and 250,000 Medicare insured patients.