By the numbers
States with higher shares of Medicaid enrollment tend to have longer overall visits to emergency rooms, analysis by the Badger Institute found.
Becker’s Hospital Review published an analysis of CMS data detailing the median duration of visits to the emergency department at hospitals across the country. The Badger Institute compared those values to Medicaid enrollment rates obtained from Medicaid.gov.
Badger Institute found a slight positive correlation in the data, with a state’s median duration increasing by about 2.5 minutes for each additional percentage point of its population enrolled in Medicaid.
According to the data, the median visit duration in Wisconsin was 138 minutes in 2024, lower than the national median of 161 minutes. About 20.4 percent of the state’s population is enrolled in Medicaid. Among Wisconsin’s neighbors, Illinois had the slowest ER visits at a median duration of 167 minutes. Its Medicaid enrollment rate was 26.2 percent.
Visits were longest in Washington, D.C., where the median duration was 301 minutes — just over five hours. Washington also had the highest proportion of its residents enrolled in Medicaid at 37.4 percent.
At the other end of the spectrum, visits were fastest in North Dakota, with a median duration of 110 minutes. Just 13.1 percent of North Dakota’s population is enrolled in Medicaid.
