Prior to the Affordable Care Act’s passage in 2010, President Obama traveled across the United States to reassure Americans that it wasn’t as bad as the vast right-wing conspiracy against it was suggesting.
“If you like your doctor, you’re going to be able to keep your doctor,” Obama pledged at George Mason University. “If you like your plan you can keep it and you don’t have to change a thing due to the health care law,” stated the White House website.
These promises proved to false, as thousands of Americans found themselves pushed into more expensive policies, some of which were not accepted by the doctors they had been seeing. But Americans were also told that some of these growing pains were unavoidable, given the goal of improving the health and well-being of all Americans. More than 30 million people were without health insurance, after all, and millions were forced by this to receive expensive treatment for routine problems at emergency rooms rather than at primary care facilities.
“I think that it’s very important that we provide coverage for all people because if everybody’s got coverage, then they’re not going to the emergency room for treatment,” Obama said at a town hall forum in Rio Rancho, New Mexico in 2009. This became a very common argument for the health care law.
Unfortunately, it is also being proven false.
According to a poll conducted by Marketing General Incorporated for the American College of Emergency Physicians, three-quarters of emergency physicians say ER visits are actually on the rise, a significant increase from one year ago.
More than 50 percent of the physicians surveyed say the number of Medicaid patients going to the ER has increased as well. One reason for the increase, which directly contradicts the promises made by the Obama administration, is that wait times for patients looking to see primary care doctors has notably worsened.
This isn’t surprising — and in fact it was predicted by the law’s critics. The Affordable Care Act effectively added millions of insured patients to the health care marketplace without doing anything to increase the supply of doctors.
“There is strong evidence that Medicaid access to primary care and specialty care is not timely, leaving Medicaid patients with few options other than the emergency department,” said Dr. Orlee Panitch, chair of the Emergency Medicine Action Fund and an emergency physician for MEPHealth in Germantown, Maryland.
Remember — this goal of reducing unnecessary emergency room visits was cited over and over again as a critical reason to adopt Obamacare. The law has not only failed to accomplish this, but in fact seems to have induced patients to flood emergency rooms.
And so costs continue to rise, wait times have increased, patients have lost preferred doctors and health care plans, and the impoverished still have no resort except to go to hospital emergency rooms instead of primary care doctors when they need routine care.
Now, more than ever, it’s apparent the Affordable Care Act needs to be repealed and replaced with a more serious reform effort that will lower costs and improve the lives of all Americans without infringing individuals’ rights.
Justin Haskins ([email protected]) is an editor at the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank headquartered in Chicago. Follow him @TheNewRevere Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
