WASHINGTON – Hospital emergency rooms are overcrowded because uninsured patients have nowhere else to turn.

Right?

Wrong, says a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Hospital emergency rooms are, indeed, jammed. But it's not for the reason proponents of nationalized health care suggest.

The study, "Uninsured Adults Presenting to U.S. Emergency Departments: Assumptions vs. Data," found most emergency rooms are packed because more patients of all kinds – insured and uninsured alike – are choosing to visit them. Further, the study found, emergency room patients are being kept there longer than necessary when they should often be checked in or treated in a doctor's office.

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"This is a larger problem, and the emergency room is the canary in the coal mine," explained Carla Keirns, a contributor to the study.

In conducting the first study of its kind, researchers discovered other scholarly papers on the uninsured found that most simply assumed the uninsured are the principal cause of emergency room overcrowding.

In fact, Devon Hetrick, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, blamed those carrying government insurance for much of the overcrowding of emergency rooms.

"It's not the uninsured who burden America's emergency rooms so much as it is people who are carrying government insurance policies," he said. "The low reimbursement rates offered doctors by government programs means very few will accept taxpayer-funded insurance any more, leaving those on government plans to visit ERs for care instead of primary-care physicians."

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