Costs of Emergency Care

Main Points

• Emergency care represents less than 2 percent of the nation’s $2.4 trillion in health care expenditures while covering 136 million people a year.
• Emergency departments are open 24 hours a day and provide “one-stop shopping” with all the hospital’s resources – such as diagnostic testing and consultation by other medical specialists – in one place.
• The most pressing economic issue in emergency medicine is uncompensated care: the lack of adequate reimbursement for emergency medical care has led to the closure of hundreds of emergency departments.
• Emergency departments are critical to our communities and must be adequately funded. 
  

Costs of Emergency Care Fact Sheet