Your E.R. wait time is still high, thanks to Obamacare
Posted by: Jon Dougherty May 5, 2015
•Republicans need to stop offering to “fix Obamacare” and instead focus on dismantling Obamacare
As conservatives of the Affordable Care Act are well aware, the law was supposed to be all things to health care, all the time. The reality, however, has been that Obamacare has been a resounding failure as public policy, evidenced most recently by the crumbling failure of the state exchanges and enrollment figures that fall well below that of its original goal of 100 percent (the lie that everyone will be covered now).
Another failed goal of the law was its promise to reduce congestion – and unpaid expenditures – at the nation’s hospital emergency rooms.
Last fall CBS News dutifully reported that, in what were early hopeful signs, the ACA appeared to be relieving E.R. congestion and over-expense:
❝[A] new study by researchers at Stanford University suggests that fewer people ages 19 to 25 are using ERs due to a provision in the ACA that allows those young adults to retain coverage under their parent’s health insurance plans. The study looked at data from state hospital records in Florida, California and New York, before and after the law was implemented. And it found that the 19-25 age group had a decrease of 2.7 ER visits per 1,000 people, or a relative change of minus 2.1 percent, under ACA.
Wow, talk about cherry-picking data. This one small group of Americans is not using E.R.’s that much anymore. [By the way, for the record, CBS News President David Rhodes and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes are brothers, which helps explain a number of things regarding the network’s soft coverage of this president and its parting of ways with hard-nosed investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson.]
Let’s fast-forward to what we like to call the “big picture.”
As reported by the Washington Examiner, when all demographics are considered, Obamacare has not only failed to live up its promise of reducing E.R. visits for everyone, it has actually made the problem worse [trigger “shocked look” here]:
"Three in four emergency room doctors said patient visits have increased since the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to have health insurance went into effect, in an email survey released Monday by the American College of Emergency Physicians.
That’s not the news some healthcare advocates had hoped for. The thought was that by expanding health coverage to more people, they would get their ailments treated earlier by primary care doctors and could avoid visiting emergency rooms, which already struggle with an overload of patients.
“I think a lot of people shared our hope that when you gave people access to Medicaid, they would go to the doctor, get preventive care and not need to go to the emergency department,” said Katherine Baicker, a health economics professor at Harvard. “That’s a reasonable hope.”
No, it’s not a “reasonable hope,” and it never was.
There is a perfectly logical reason why E.R. visits have only increased. It’s because the dynamic that drove so many Americans to the E.R. in the first place – lack of access to a primary care physician – is still in play.
Obamacare – and specifically the extended Medicaid coverage it created – may have given people “health insurance” for the first time, but many doctors are not taking Medicaid patients because Medicaid reimbursement rates are so low.
“I don’t think most physicians know what they’re being reimbursed. Only when they start seeing some of those rates come through will they realize how low the rates are they agreed to,” Hartford, Conn., Dr. Doug Gerard told NPR.
“You get what you pay for,” adds Dr. Bob Russo, a radiologist. “If you can’t convince [doctors] that they’re not losing money doing their job, then it’s a problem. And they haven’t been able to convince people of that.”
Why doesn’t the government just boost reimbursement rates to physicians? A couple of reasons.
First, socialists like President Obama have hinted that doctors earn too much, complaining 2009 during his push to get the ACA approved that physicians have created “a model that has taken the pursuit of medicine from a profession — a calling — to a business.” The fact is, even the smallest family doctor’s office of past decades had to run at a profit in order to stay viable. For another, much of today’s medical “business model” is predicated on the fact that health care is the most regulated of all industries in the country. Dare Obama to say that government deregulation of health care would again recreate a “calling” over the “business model,” and see what he says.
Second, any boosting of reimbursement would cause the government to find a way to boost its income, so it could pay for higher reimbursement rates; that usually comes in the form of taxes or higher fees imposed on those members of society who are footing the subsidized bill for the Medicaid recipients, both politically unpopular. This is just the government’s version of a private insurance company being forced to raise premiums to cover higher reimbursement rates (which is happening already, thanks to Obamacare – another broken promise).
The next step may be forcing physicians to see all patients, if they want any government-related reimbursement (including Medicare). If or when that happens, leftist Democrats will have finally succeeded in creating a two-class system for medicine, precisely the thing they claimed not to want: The class of have’s – those doctors who opt out of accepting any insurance from any entity and only take cash (already happening: Concierge medicine) – and the have not’s, which will be all other levels of care. Guess which level will get the best care?
That there is so much wrong with Obamacare, and that it is failing to live up to its hype and promises, really should not come as a surprise. It was destined to become the massive failure that it is because left-wing eggheads who were never going to have to suffer under the weight of its failures designed it under false pretenses using flawed models and unrealistic aspirations.
Republicans need to stop offering to “fix Obamacare” and instead focus on dismantling Obamacare. Give medicine back to the providers, so it can become a “calling” again instead of forcing them to make it a “business.”
Poster Comment:
No Obummer Care.