One by one, the claims that ObamaCare socialized medicine will “rescue” health care in America are collapsing.
The Congressional Budget Office has declared that ObamaCare may cost tens of billions of dollars more than first estimated. Many small-business owners who thought they would get help with rising insurance premiums for their employees are discovering they won’t qualify.
And now, some already overburdened hospital emergency rooms are expecting a flood of new patients when millions of people who are newly insured under ObamaCare cannot find a primary care doctor.
If you’ll recall, ObamaCare was supposed to relieve emergency room caseloads by insuring the uninsured.
Promoting the medical overhaul, President Barack Obama last March said that “taxpayers currently end up subsidizing the uninsured when they’re forced to go to the emergency room for care, to the tune of about a thousand bucks per family.” He said ObamaCare would create savings by redirecting people from emergency rooms to doctors’ offices.
The trouble is, there was already a doctor shortage, and ObamaCare will worsen that shortage by adding tens of millions of new patients while doing little to increase the number of care providers. So lots of people will end up in emergency rooms anyway.
“There’s no question that emergency department (visits) will go up (under health care reform) … because insurance doesn’t equal access,” Dr. David Seaberg, dean of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga and an emergency physician at Erlanger hospital, told the Times Free Press.
Hospitals in Tennessee and Georgia are trying to get more efficient to accommodate the expected rise of caseloads of people seeking routine care in emergency rooms.
We sympathize with them in their predicament. But if ObamaCare is not repealed or seriously modified, dangerously clogged emergency rooms are not the only crisis it will create.