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The costs of emergency room cost-cutting

By The New York Times  
   March 29, 2013

For close to 50 years, emergency rooms have been fingered as a major source of excessive health care costs. And while some newer research has challenged the idea that a large proportion of patients visit the emergency room for routine problems, many payers and policy makers continue to focus on these patients as a major source of wasteful spending. Not long ago, for example, in an effort to cut back on Medicaid expenditures, several states zeroed in on these so-called "unwarranted visits" and proposed a policy so apparently logical that it was hard to resist the temptation to slap yourself on the forehead. The proposal was to reimburse for an emergency room visit based on the urgency of the discharge diagnosis.

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