The health law was supposed to reduce pressure on emergency care facilities. It hasn’t.
Peter Suderman|May. 4, 2015 2:40 pm
In September, 2009, President Obama gave a prime time speech to the joint Congress making the case for the health care law that would come to be known as Obamacare. Much of the speech was devoted to explaining and justifying the law’s major components. Subsidies, he argued, were necessary to ensure that health coverage would be affordable enough that people would actually buy it. The individual mandate requiring most people to maintain coverage was necessary to ensure that free-riders didn’t take advantage of the law’s regulations and subsidies to wait until sick before purchasing coverage.
“Such irresponsible behavior costs all the rest of us money,” Obama said. “If there are affordable options and people still don’t sign up for health insurance, it means we pay for these people’s expensive emergency room visits.”
Nearly six years later, the mandate is in force, and the subsidies are offsetting a hefty chunk of the premiums for most of the people who’ve gained private coverage through the law’s exchanges. Millions of people have been covered by the law; last month, Gallup reported that the national uninsurance rate had dipped to its lowest point since 2008.
And yet in the time since Obamacare’s major coverage expansion has kicked in, the number of emergency room visits has not gone down. Nor has it held flat. Instead, it appears to be growing, perhaps quite a bit, according to a survey of nearly 3,000 ER doctors notedin The Wall Street Journal.
https://reason.com/blog/2015/05/04/emergency-room-visits-continue-to-rise-u
