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New Oregon Data: Expanding Medicaid Increases Usage Of Emergency Rooms, Undermining Central Rationale For Obamacare/ Affordable Care Act (ACA) For years, it has been the number one talking point of Obamacare supporters. People who are uninsured end up getting costly care from hospitals’ emergency rooms. “Those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it—about $1,000 per year that pays for [the uninsureds’] emergency room and charitable care,” said President Obama in 2009. Obamacare, the President told us, would solve that problem by covering the uninsured, thereby driving premiums down. A new study, published in the journal Science, definitively reaches the opposite conclusion. In Oregon, people who gained coverage through Medicaid used the emergency room 40 percent more than those who were uninsured. The “free rider” argument was always bunk Just like the “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” promise, the promise that Obamacare would make health care less expensive by expanding coverage was always a crock. Nationally, it’s estimated that we spend about $50 billion a year on uncompensated care for the uninsured. But Obamacare spends $250 billion a year of taxpayer money on covering the uninsured. Only in Washington is spending $250 billion to address a $50 billion problem considered “savings.” In Massachusetts, under Romneycare, the math worked out in a similar way. The Bay State spent $661 million on uncompensated care in the year before Romneycare went into effect; by the 2009 fiscal year, that figure had decreased to $414 million: a savings of $247 million. But in 2011, the cost of the state’s insurance subsidy program was $830 million, and that doesn’t even count the tab paid by the federal government for the state’s expansion of Medicaid. Did emergency-room usage in Massachusetts decline because of all this extra money? The opposite. ER visits actually rose by 7 percent between 2005 and 2007, and the state’s costs for caring for ER patients rose 17 percent between 2007 and 2009. And one of the big holes in the myth of uninsured “free riders” is that the uninsured only account for 15 percent of the population, 14 percent of total ER visits, and 12 percent of aggregate ER expenditures, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Medicaid beneficiaries, by contrast, accounted for 9 percent of the population, 15 percent of visits, and 9 percent of expenses. Given all of this data and experience, it was obvious that expanding coverage through Obamacare would increase taxpayer costs, not reduce them. But predictably, the pro-Obamacare “fact-checkers,” like those at PolitiFact, have been nowhere to be found. The latest data from the Oregon Medicaid experiment Along come economists Amy Finkelstein of MIT and Kate Baicker of Harvard, who have been participating in the now-famous Oregon Medicaid experiment. Regular readers of The Apothecary will recall that this study compared a group of Oregonians who were uninsured, and stayed that way, to a group who had “won” a lottery to enroll in Medicaid. The study found that Medicaid “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes,” a finding that reinforces extensive published research. (I also discuss this research in my new book, How Medicaid Fails The Poor.) Finkelstein and Baicker, in their new Science article, looked at records for 24,646 residents of the Portland, Oregon area who had participated in the Medicaid experiment. They found, as they had previously, that the subgroup that had gained coverage under Medicaid showed no improvement in the management of their chronic medical problems, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes. They also found that those on Medicaid used the emergency room 40 percent more than the uninsured did—1.43 ER visits per Medicaid enrollee, as against 1.02 for the uninsured. More to the point, a majority of the emergency room visits were unnecessary, because they involved conditions that could easily have been managed outside of the ER. Of the 0.41-per-person increase in visits, 0.18 were “primary care treatable,” meaning they didn’t require ER care. 0.12 didn’t even qualify as emergency care. 0.04 did qualify as emergency issues, but could have been prevented by adequate primary care. The Medicaid-driven increases in each of these categories was statistically significant, meaning that the differences were large enough that they are highly unlikely to be statistical noise. For data tables and more of this story, click here.