ObamaCare's Phony Medicaid Promise Exposed

 

IBDEditorials.com

Failure: ObamaCare is driving millions of people into Medicaid, a program we now know does nothing to improve health and actually drives emergency-room use higher.

A central premise of ObamaCare was that vastly expanding Medicaid would ultimately save health care dollars. The millions of uninsured gaining access to Medicaid would no longer crowd costly emergency rooms looking for care, the thinking went. And that improved access would keep them healthier.

Turns out that neither of those claims is true.

A study published late last week in the prestigious journal Science found that Medicaid actually increases emergency room use — by a substantial margin.

Comparing Medicaid patients to the uninsured in Oregon, the researchers found that those on Medicaid used emergency room visits 40% more often than the uninsured.

This was true, they discovered, "across a broad range of types of visits, conditions," including visits to a primary care doctor.

Meanwhile, an earlier study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that people on Medicaid were no healthier than those who were uninsured.

Medicaid, these researchers concluded, "generated no significant improvement in measured health outcomes."

Both studies were possible because of a 2008 Medicaid expansion program in Oregon. Of the 90,000 who applied for coverage through that program, the state picked 30,000 by lottery.

In effect, Oregon's lottery "created a rare opportunity to study the effects of Medicaid coverage using a randomized, controlled design," the Science study noted.

Even before these studies, Medicaid's myriad problems were well known.

Its ridiculously low reimbursement rates — in some areas, Medicaid pays less than 40% of what private insurers pay — had already driven nearly a third of doctors to refuse new Medicaid patients.

In California, more than half of the doctors have closed their doors to Medicaid. That, in turn, led to chronic doctor shortages in many areas for existing Medicaid patients, who then ended up in the ER looking for care, getting lousy care, or going without.

The problem is that, rather than fixing this badly broken system, ObamaCare is shoving millions more into it. In fact, twice as many people who applied through an ObamaCare exchange in the first three months ended up on Medicaid rather than a private insurance plan.

With these added millions competing for increasingly scarce doctors, many will likely end up piling into ERs. And, since an ER visit won't cost them, they'll have even more incentive to make that the place to go.

Many critics of ObamaCare pointed out this adverse side effect long ago, but their concerns were, of course, ignored. As a result, millions now stuck in Medicaid will learn the hard way that ObamaCare is an empty promise.