This would be a shocking development, if so many who opposed the legislation hadn’t predicted it:
A poll of over 2,000 emergency room doctors shows that visits to ERs have increased, and in precisely the population that ObamaCare advocates claimed they would decrease and reduce costs.
You don’t say.
In fact, Obamacare was supposed to decrease ER visits by making regular checkups affordable.
It makes one think that those who thought they could tweak a system with millions of inputs and relationships just by regulation were either stupid or malicious.
I pick malicious.
Sounds like one of the lies used to peddle Britain’s NHS in the 50s. ‘Of course it will be more expensive to start with, but, before long, everyone will be so much healthier that costs will fall’.
And now, in the real world, it’s one of the biggest employers on the planet…
BTW, why do you think you need to pick one or the other? I’d vote for stupid and malicious.
Stupid, malicious, a rampant Napoleonic Syndrome and with a heavy dose of arrogance.
I pick stupid, but stupid with bells on. So stupid, they chose church bells. And then cracked the bells, so they were only good for scrap. And then … (you give the next stupid step).
Yours,
Tom
And all for the low low price of a 41% increase in premiums!!!!!
Jim hasn’t gotten his marching orders yet, I see.
My guess is he will blame doctors or providers.
Damned greedy doctors, demanding to be paid for their work! How dare them! Doctors, nurses, lab techs, etc. should all work for free! The honor of serving the state and the proles should be all the payment they need. /sarc
And not only are those ER visits skyrocketing(as predicted) …all for the low low bargain basement price of a 41% increase (as predicted) in premiums…..
But Rural hospitals are closing (as predicted)….
Washington Post:
“Experts and practitioners cite declining federal reimbursements for hospitals under the Affordable Care Act as the principal reasons for the recent closures.”
And – as an added bonus to the (predicted) increase in ER visits, Fox headlines:
“Two-Thirds of ObamaCare Customers Had to Pay Back Subsidy Amount to IRS: Study”
“The tax-prep giant studied its own massive customer base and concluded that two-thirds of its filers who got subsidies from Obamacare were overpaid during the course of the year, and owed money back to the IRS on the April 15 deadline.
They repaid $729 on average, cutting the average refund by about a third.”
Isn’t it wonderful?
There was a prediction that Obamacare would cut the number of uninsured people using ERs for routine medical care. It would be interesting to know whether it has, but unfortunately this poll doesn’t even try to answer that question. It asks ER doctors whether (to the best of their memory) they’ve seen more patients, but doesn’t consult hospital records to actually count visits, or distinguish between patients with insurance and those without, or try to determine whether visitors are using ERs for non-urgent care that would be more efficiently provided elsewhere.
The fact that this scrap of not particularly insightful data has gotten so much play among the law’s detractors tells you a lot about how well Obamacare is going generally.
Right. So when I tell you I know people who are now in debt because their deductible went up from 250 dollars to three thousand, is that a “scrap of data”?
Whatever you’re given you deny, deny, deny.
And that is what I mean by malicious. When you do anything to seize control of an institution and ignore the intended and unintended consequences, that is what I call a coup.
And a coup is malicious, because it doesn’t care about the little people, only about gaining power for a select group of individuals.
But Jim thinks that the goal posts can be moved yet again by using weasel words. Notice he is now claiming that ER use was never predicted to drop but that it was only predicted to drop for the uninsured. And of course, since it is illegal not to have insurance policies that give free abortions to men, everyone using the ER should have insurance unless they are lawbreakers.
This may fly in the face of what Obama and the Democrats have been saying for almost a decade now but sometimes history needs to be revised. Like when they said illegal immigrants wouldn’t get Obamacare and that the feds wouldn’t pay for abortions.
The law was passed by lying to congress, bribing key congressmen, and lying to the American public. Why would they stop lying now?
And of course, since it is illegal not to have insurance policies that give free abortions to men, everyone using the ER should have insurance unless they are lawbreakers.
It isn’t illegal to not have insurance, it makes you subject to a penalty (unless you have an exemption). No insurance policy is required to cover abortions for men or women, much less make them free.
Like when they said illegal immigrants wouldn’t get Obamacare
They don’t.
and that the feds wouldn’t pay for abortions
They don’t.
lying … lying … lying
Pot, kettle.
Selective responses, typical.
We were told Catholics wouldn’t have to provide contraceptive coverage in their insurance, but you’re trying to shove that down their throats. Only through lawsuits can we hold you back from your hideous agenda.
No illegal immigrant gets Obamacare yet, but give enough green cards and they’ll get it. See how you weasel around people’s comments?
“It isn’t illegal to not have insurance, it makes you subject to a penalty ”
What happens when you break a law? You get punished.
Also, SCOTUS ruled it is not a penalty but a tax.
Your links are just more lies that have been refuted by events on the ground. The feds do pay for abortions and illegals do get Obamacare. I am sure you have some weasel words to try and talk your way around these statements but we have been down this road before with keeping doctors and insurance or even driving down costs, prices, and ER visits.
Why do you assume the doctors don’t know the ER statistics in their own hospitals? Because they were “polled”? Tell us all why polling implies lack of data on the part of the respondent. Why do you assume they are merely talking about a feeling? Probably because that’s all you do, so you project.
And as is always…ALWAYS ….the case you fail to read the article:
The trend is hardly new, either. Fifteen months ago, the New York Times [ The NY Times mind you….] reported that a study in Oregon showed the exact same trend:
Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits because people would go to primary care doctors instead. But a rigorous new experiment in Oregon has raised questions about that assumption, finding that newly insured people actually went to the emergency room a good deal more often.
The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the emergency room than their uninsured counterparts during their first 18 months with insurance.
The pattern was so strong that it held true across most demographic groups, times of day and types of visits, including those for conditions that were treatable in primary care settings.
The findings cast doubt on the hope that expanded insurance coverage will help rein in emergency room costs just as more than two million people are gaining coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
And that’s not the only report of statistics:
LA Times:
A key measure of hospital emergency room use in Los Angeles County shows continued growth during the first six months of Obamacare, but also points to shifting patterns of where patients are choosing to receive urgent medical treatment.
USA Today:
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It wasn’t supposed to work this way, but since the Affordable Care Act took effect in January, Norton Hospital has seen its packed emergency room become even more crowded, with about 100 more patients a month.
That 12 percent spike in the number of patients — many of whom aren’t actually facing true emergencies — is spurring the Louisville hospital to convert a waiting room into more exam rooms.
Article after article after article all reporting the same thing.
And so you staunchly claim that we “don’t know”.
The only person who doesn’t know…is you.
This is from September 2014:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/09/09/emergency-room-use-thwarts-health-reform/
The Oregon study has a better design, and does suggest that people who get insurance use the ER more than they did before they had it. We don’t know whether that’s a temporary effect (e.g. because the previously uninsured may not have a regular doctor, and it may take time for them to change their health care habits), or more long-lasting. And it isn’t all that surprising: people without insurance have reason to only seek medical attention as a last resort, while you’d expect people with insurance to be quicker to get seen, in the ER or elsewhere. Oregon’s response to the study, if memory serves, was to look into ways to encourage Medicaid recipients to see their primary care doctors when appropriate. I don’t know if they’ve yet evaluated the success of those efforts.
It may well be that Obamacare turns out to be a total failure at reducing unnecessary use of emergency rooms. That would be a disappointment, but considering how well the law is doing meeting its bigger goals (especially reducing the number of people without insurance), I wouldn’t count it as a major mark against the law as a whole.
By reducing, you mean putting more people on Medicare, which could have been done without taking control of an industry.
Jim is still using the talking point that Obamacare only provides subsidies for insurance and has no other statutory requirements on either the insurance industry or health care industry.
It really doesn’t matter how many links Jim uses to deny what we all know. The democrat party wants single-payer that will provide abortions and force contraceptions on every insurance provider.
I thought about weighing in on this, but then I did a search for ER visits and found polls starting from 2012 and every year since noting that ER visits were on the rise. And while I typically agree that polls are at as certain as other statistical measures, there are two problems with Jim’s argument. First, he cites polls more often than any commenter on this blog. Second, the CDC seems to have quite providing ER visit counts after 2008. Now they only provide percentage by reasons for visits. How convenient that they would quit at that time providing totals to let others work the math.