Obamacare: Longer lines in the emergency room

  One angle that Barack Obama tried to sell when the debate for healthcare reform was still raging on was his claim that many uninsured Americans are forced to use the emergency room because they have no other choice. The bill for the emergency room visit would be passed on to the taxpayer, therefor we were already paying for the uninsured. His claim was that if healthcare reform was passed, people would gain coverage thereby avoiding the emergency room and the American taxpayer would save money; a bonus would be that the emergency rooms wouldn’t be as crowded so when someone came in with a real emergency they would have a much shorter waiting period.

  According to this article, that might not end up being what happens now that Obamacare is law. There are a couple of problems at issue here that may lead to even longer lines in the emergency room.

  The first problem with Barack Obama’s argument is the fact that there are only a limited number of doctors to go around and Barack Obama’s plan will add somewhere around 30 million people to the system. There will not be enough doctors to go around, so where will these people go? One researcher puts it this way:

More people will have coverage and will be less afraid to go to the emergency department if they’re sick or hurt and have nowhere else to go…. We just don’t have other places in the system for these folks to go

 And one needs to look no further than the Massachusetts model that the national healthcare reform bill was modeled after. Since Massachusetts forced all of her residents to buy healthcare insurance visits to the emergency room have increased somewhere between 4% and 7%.

  An emergency room doctor in Boston put it thusly:

Just because we’ve insured people doesn’t mean they now have access

They’re coming to the emergency department because they don’t have access to alternatives

  Massachusetts requires her residents to have healthcare insurance, yet emergency room visits have increased, because as the doctor said, “just because we’ve insured people doesn’t mean they now have access.” I would like to know what Massachusetts has accomplished other than forcing the residents to buy something that provides them with no benefits. What good is coverage if the people have no access to take advantage of the coverage?

  This is what we can expect under Obamacare; Massachusetts provided the Obama regime with the model for healthcare reform, we can expect the same pitfalls.

  But the news doesn’t get any better when you read the article that I linked to and you find out that the uninsured were not the biggest visitors to the emergency room. By far the people who uses the emergency room the most are Medicaid recipients.

The biggest users of emergency rooms by far are Medicaid recipients

  And that is problem number two; Obamacare is expanding the Medicaid system to include another 16 million people.  The group of people that already use the emergency room the most is going to grow exponentially, naturally this means that we can count on more people using the emergency room.

  As American College of Emergency Physicians president Dr. Angela Gardner said:

We’re starting out with crowded conditions and anticipating things will only get worse

  Obamacare means longer lines in the emergency room despite his claims that this bill would cut down on the number of people who use the emergency room because they have no other option. Under Obamacare these people will still have no other option. Barack Obama was either lying when he made his claims or he was ignorant of the consequences. I don’t know which is worse.

This is change we can believe in?