It appears to be in the single digits, but there are various ways to calculate the cost so a precise number may be in the end subjective.
During the Oct. 22, 2013, edition of CNN’s Crossfire, Gillespie had an exchange with Van Jones, one of the show’s liberal co-hosts. Jones argued that Obama’s health care law should be able to bring uninsured Americans into the health care system in less costly and more efficient ways, cutting the use of emergency rooms for front-line care.
Gillespie countered that "emergency rooms (are) 2 percent of all health care spending. It's not a huge amount. That's a big red herring in this."
We wondered whether Gillespie was correct.
We easily found the source of the statistic -- a calculation publicized by the American College of Emergency Physicians. Obviously, this is a group with a dog in the fight, but the calculation they made was pretty straightforward and is based on federal data.
The group used figures from 2008 collected by the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, a study undertaken by a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. The survey found that the total amount of money spent on emergency care -- including physician and other emergency-room services -- was $47.3 billion. That’s slightly less than 2 percent of the same survey’s $2.4 trillion estimate of total health care expenditures that year.
