Comment: The President promised Obamacare would reduce E.R. visits, reducing cost shifted onto the public. Obamacare moves Americans onto Medicaid. A recent comprehensive study shows Medicaid beneficiaries in Oregon visit the E.R. 40% more often after enrollment, increasing E.R. use, cost, and cost shifted onto the public.
“[...] A landmark study called the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment has found that contrary to the president’s assurances (see above), expanding health insurance to low-income households does not decrease their use of emergency rooms. Results from that experiment, published today in the journal Science, show expanding Medicaid to cover these households instead increases their emergency-room use by a sizable 40 percent.”
“This is a very big deal.”
“One of the ways the “Affordable Care Act” was supposed to make health care more affordable was by reducing unnecessary emergency-room use.” [...]
“There was always a lot wrong with the president’s line. For one, economists tend not to buy the cost-shifting story.” [...]
[...] “Writing in Science, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment researchers found that Medicaid did increase the use of preventive and primary-care services, but emergency-room use rose as well. Over an 18-month period, 100 low-income, uninsured adults in the Portland area would visit the ER about once each, on average. When Medicaid made health care “free” [to] these households, they made an additional 40 visits over that period — a 40-percent increase.”
“The increase was entirely comprised people using the ER either for non-emergency medical needs, or for emergencies that could have been prevented with primary care. “Emergency department use increases even in classes of visits that might be most substitutable for other outpatient care,” the authors wrote, “such as those during standard hours (on-hours) and those for ‘non-emergent’ and ‘primary care treatable’ conditions.””
“The authors also did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that “Medicaid increases annual spending in the emergency department by about $120 per covered individual.” So if ObamaCare enrolls all 3.9 million individuals that it has so far identified as being eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP, the law could increase — not reduce — ER spending by something on the order of half a billion dollars per year. If all 50 states had implemented the law’s Medicaid expansion, the additional ER spending might have hit $1 billion per year.“ (emphasis added)
Oregon Study Exposes Another ObamaCare Falsehood: Rather Than Reduce Unnecessary ER Use, Medicaid Increases It
Michael F. Cannon, 1/02/2014