It’s 2 p.m. on a Saturday, and you’re on the lake with your friends. As you start to get out of the water near the rocky shore, you trip over one of the unseen stones beneath your feet, and before you know it, you’re gasping in pain while your ankle turns a sickening shade of grayish blue. Your friends start to dial 9-1-1, but you don’t think the sprain is that bad despite the color and your pain. Instead, you brace the ankle as best as you can with your wet T-shirt and hobble into the car, directing your friends to drive you to the nearest walk-in clinic.
If this situation sounds familiar, then that’s because over the past few years, urgent care facilities have become the go-to place for treating non-life-threatening emergencies. In the old days, you might have let your friends call an ambulance to take you to the hospital for the sprain. Without a medical degree, it’s hard to tell when something is serious and when it needs straightforward care.
Urgent care centers have become essential today because they offer convenient services at odd hours. If your sprain had happened on a weekday, then you might have made a call to your primary doctor. Because it’s a weekend, you know that a walk-in clinic will have what you need to take care of the injury. There are several reasons why urgent care centers have started to overtake hospitals as a person’s first choice for medical attention. Below, we examine some of these reasons.
The Impact of the ACA
Since the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2013, millions of people have signed up for health insurance on and off the marketplaces. Health insurance plans available today include coverage for ambulatory care, which is the type of treatment you’re most likely to find at an urgent care center. With an influx of new beneficiaries and an increase in the amount of care that people can receive at non-emergency facilities, urgent care centers continue to gain popularity nationwide. More important, young people and low-income families with insurance for the first time in their lives now have options for seeking care.
In the past, emergency rooms treated a high volume of patients that were suffering from conditions as innocuous as the common cold or a sore throat. Without access to primary care, low- to medium-income families throughout America sought help from the one place that can’t turn away sick people regardless of their symptoms. By law, emergency rooms have to treat the people who visit them. This is a good law to have when someone is suffering from a heart attack, but it’s a bad precedent to set for people with easily treatable conditions. Excessive use of emergency rooms was one major factor in the inflated cost of healthcare prior to the ACA.
Efficient, Affordable Care
The ACA changes the way that people seek care. Instead of wasting hours in the emergency room for straightforward medical conditions, patients can visit a walk-in clinic for the same treatments. At nearly 70 percent of urgent care centers in America, patients will wait less than 20 minutes to see a doctor. Only 3 percent reported a 40-minute wait time or more. When you visit the ER, the hospital will prioritize your needs behind the person who’s exhibiting the most obvious life-threatening symptoms, which means that you’ll probably wait a couple of hours or more if you’re there for a broken leg. In an on-the-go society, people don’t have time to wait for quality medical care.
The services offered by an urgent care place also cost significantly less than ER treatments do. In an age of expanded healthcare access, urgent care centers offer a more cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional ER visits. A trip to an urgent care facility might cost around $150 including your $50 co-pay. For the same treatment at an emergency room, you might pay anywhere from $800 to $1,200.
No one should have to pay $1,200 for a sprained ankle unless that sprain demands immediate surgery. It’s easy to argue in favor of urgent care centers based on dollars and time, but are these walk-in clinics an effective alternative in terms of treatment? After all, some people really do need to visit the emergency room for life-threatening conditions.
According to
NotifyMD.com, about “13.7 to 27.1 percent of all emergency department visits could take place at an urgent care center or a retail clinic.” Roughly one out of every 20 patients who visits the ER could go to a walk-in clinic instead for the same care. Citing a 2010 study by Health Affairs, the website further notes that the reduction in emergency room visits for non-emergency situations could generate savings of about $4.4 billion each year.
Nationwide Growth
There’s no doubt that visiting an urgent care place for non-life-threatening situations will save consumers and hospitals money. Already, more people have come to realize that their twisted ankles, rashes and flu-like symptoms don’t have to be treated by the on-call doctor at their local ER. Between 2010 and 2012, urgent care centers saw an increase of about three patients per day per facility throughout the country. This increase indicates that walk-in clinics are being seen as an increasingly attractive option for minor to moderate urgent situations.
