ObamaCare

ObamaCare will overwhelm emergency rooms, cost $115 billion more than originally predicted
Posted: 16 May 2010 09:00 PM PDT
One of the points Democrats used over and over again in support of ObamaCare was that too many people go to the emergency room for simple health issues that primary care physicians should be handling because they don’t have health insurance. With ObamaCare, they said, people will stop flooding emergency rooms and instead see a family doctor. Not so fast. This rosy prediction, just like all the other rosy predictions the Democrats made about ObamaCare, is just not going to happen:

The new healthcare law will pack 32 million newly insured people into emergency rooms already crammed beyond capacity, according to experts on healthcare facilities.

A chief aim of the new healthcare law was to take the pressure off emergency rooms by mandating that people either have insurance coverage. The idea was that if people have insurance, they will go to a doctor rather than putting off care until they faced an emergency.

People who build hospitals, however, say newly insured people will still go to emergency rooms for primary care because they don’t have a doctor.

“Everybody expected that one of the initial impacts of reform would be less pressure on emergency departments; it’s going to be exactly the opposite over the next four to eight years,” said Rich Dallam, a healthcare partner at the architectural firm NBBJ, which designs healthcare facilities.

“We don’t have the primary care infrastructure in place in America to cover the need. Our clients are looking at and preparing for more emergency department volume, not less,” he said.

Some Democrats agree with this assessment.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) suspects the fallout that occurred in Massachusetts’ emergency rooms could happen nationwide after health reform kicks in.

Massachusetts in 2006 created near-universal coverage for residents, which was supposed to ease the traffic in hospital emergency rooms.

But a recent poll by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that nearly two-thirds of the state’s residents say emergency department wait times have either increased or remained the same.

I’m not surprised one bit. Conservatives and free market experts all predicted as much. Those of us who were against ObamaCare said many times that you can’t add 32 million people to an already congested health care system and expect to have increased access to health care and health care providers.

We also said that it isn’t ossible to add 32 million people to an already expensive and overly regulated health care system and expect to see costs go down. And we were right on that count, too. According to the CBO, ObamaCare will actually cost $115 billion more than originally predicted, sending the price tag for the first ten years to more than $1 trillion. So, once again Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the rest of the Democrats who claimed ObamaCare would increase access and decrease costs have been proven to be liars.