Uninsured Patients Discharged From Hospitals Sooner Than Those With Health Coverage

New York, NY — Discharge rates for patients in hospitals differ between the insured and uninsured, a study published in Annals of Family Medicine suggests.
Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina looked at the records of nearly 850,000 adults discharged from U.S. hospitals between 2003 and 2007. They found that uninsured patients had a slightly shorter stay than patients with private insurance or Medicaid. They cautioned, however, that a shorter hospital stay was not necessarily detrimental to the patient’s health.
On average, uninsured patients with potentially preventable hospitalizations — worsening asthma, for example — stayed in the hospital just under 2.8 days. That compared with 2.9 days for patients with insurance and 3.2 days for Medicaid patients, an article from Reuters reports.