Another Obamacare Goal Fails as Medicaid Expansion Increased Emergency Room Visits & Costs

Every move by the regime has ulterior motives which will all backfire like free healthcare would curb emergency room visits.The health system will continue to be abused no matter what and the costs for emergency care will continue to climb. Free healthcare has to be paid somewhere and by someone. This is a concept the left cannot get a grasp on thinking the rich will cover the costs when they have to pay full price. Does it ever happen that way though? No, instead the middle class will foot the bill of higher emergency room visits along with increased costs everywhere else by businesses trying to compensate for the hit they will take because of obamacare.
….

Medicaid expansion increased emergency room visits, study finds
CBS/AP
SALEM, Ore. — A new study has found that people enrolled recently in Medicaid went to the emergency room 40 percent more frequently than others, often seeking help for conditions that could be treated less expensively in a doctor’s office or an urgent care clinic.

The research, published Thursday by the journal Science, comes as millions of Americans gain health insurance this week under the federal health care law, many of them through Medicaid.
The findings help inform a long-running debate about the effect of expanding Medicaid and suggest that hospitals and health officials around the nation should be prepared for an increase in emergency room trips in the coming months.

The study is the third to arise from a limited expansion of Medicaid in Oregon five years ago. Demand exceeded the available funding, so the state used a lottery to randomly choose people for coverage from a waiting list. The lottery created two groups of similar people, one consisting of new Medicaid patients, the other a comparison group of people who weren’t selected. It gave scientists a rare chance to evaluate the program in a randomized, controlled study — the gold-standard for scientific research...more