The headline of a story in The Hill over the weekend: " Health Reform Threatens to Cram Already Overwhelmed Emergency Rooms"
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.
The Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agrees with this assessment:
“The supply of doctors can’t be increased very quickly – there’s a time lag,” he said, adding, “Is the last resort to newly covered people the emergency room? I would say that is a possibility, but I wouldn’t say anybody has a very good handle on exactly how much of an infrastructure problem there will be or exactly how it might work out.”
Stanley Goldfarb made this exact point in response to the claim by Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke that Obamacare "reduces the hidden tax of about $1,000 for family coverage that those with insurance pay to cover the cost of the uninsured who rely on emergency rooms for care."
But, The Hill reports, the "Academy of Architecture for Health predicts hospitals will need at least $2 trillion over the next 20 years to meet the coming demand."
In related news, a new Rasmussen poll shows that support for repealing Obamacare is holding steady at 56%.