Posted on 06/25/2017 9:07:13 AM PDT by artichokegrower
California’s low-income residents continue to head straight for the emergency room — instead of their doctor’s office — for expensive treatment, a practice that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to curb.
Three years into Obamacare, new figures show, ER visits by the state’s Medi-Cal patients rose 44 percent from early 2014 to late 2016.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Along with if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor, if you like your insurance plan you can keep your insurance plan and the average family is going to save $2,500 per year.
California just decided not to go forward with CalifornaCare, which would only have cost about $11K/yr for every Californian.
I know those are harsh words, but looking at this article, it seems everyone that doesn't have enough sense to take care of themselves or are just lazy and lush off of the people (govt. our tax money) are no better than brute beasts being fed fodder to stay alive.
So they learned that obungle would REALLY take care of them, eh ?
OUT'A MY WAY !
I GOT AN EMERGENCY ROOM TO GET TO !
Offering financial incentives to individual doctors won’t work especially in CA becuse most doctors are salaried employees of large hospital corporations. Any fee increase goes to the hospital corporation; employees are incentivized by corporation for bonuses etc., not by the government.
Those in small groups and private practices generally do not accept Medicaid and a small fee increase is no incentive especially when you consider the compliance costs of regulation.
What CA could do is force doctors to accept these patients as a condition of licensure, but that again would be met with resistance and backfire. Any mandate to see these patients would get a court challenge, and even if that fails, more private doctors would leave the state, work for a hospital corporation or go out of practice. Keep in mind that the average age of self employed doctors is much higher than employed doctors. Even with the mandate, private doctors could forfill their obligation by seeing a large number of Medical patients per hour at the lowest fee schedule. Visits would be even more cursory and care would be worse. The brush off to specialist and the ER would accelerate.
I have had business supplied Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance as a function of my wife’s employment, until just recently. I will have to venture onto the exchanges to purchase health insurance directly during the next month, since my wife, 5 years my senior, just retired. All the years that I have been covered by employer sponsored insurance, the policies all had a very inviting cap on out of pocket payments, if you entered the hospital by the emergency room, as opposed to being admitted by your physician. Say you were going into the hospital for what ultimately was a liver transplant. If you entered the hospital by walking in though the emergency room the out of pocket might be capped at $200, whereas if you were admitted otherwise, you might face up to 20% of the cost of ensuing treatment.
I had a primary care physician in Atlanta who instructed me not to come to his office, but to go to the emergency room of a nearby hospital, when the subject was a severe and persistent migraine headache. I did as he recommended, had a CAT-scan of my head and received morphine to relive the headache. The nominal bill was $2400, and I would have had to pay $480 of that if the physician had referred me, but only $100 under the then existing policy if I walked in to the emergency room. I felt guilty while there for taking up an emergency room spot while everyone coming in around me was in serious condition from auto accidents and the like.
Private insurance policies have had, at least in the recent past, built in incentives to use the emergency room as a gateway. Assuming that has not changed, I don’t see why there was any expectation that emergency room visits would decline.
One of the basic laws of economics - when something is completely free, demand is, in theory, infinite.
Here's what's been bothering me. I don't much believe in coincidence; things that happen at the same time can't help but be affected by each other. OH, by Kasick's dictate, implemented expanded Medicaid. Since that's happened, the opioid problem has spun out of control. I can't help but think that people without the will power or incentive to handle their use have been given pain killer prescriptions for every real or imagined insurmountable pain by ERs. That's what ERs do.
Could too-easy access to these pharmaceutical poisons be causing the problems that are now being faced? Would people who can't handle self-responsibility be better off if they weren't enabled by too-easy solutions to their ailments? Is our nanny gov causing a death spiral for civilization, a social and economic cost that's unaffordable? I suspect so.
“California just decided not to go forward with CalifornaCare, which would only have cost about $11K/yr for every Californian.”
Well not every Californian. 14 million Californians are currently on Medi-Cal and pay nothing for health insurance. I assume they will continue to do so. 5 million Californians are illegal aliens and don’t pay into the system. So you probably need to at least double that $11K/yr figure for the taxpaying Californian
A simple low cost plan would probably eliminate most of these visits.
Have each ER admit office buy a folding card table and two folding chairs. Then set the card table up with the two chairs set up by the table, in front of the Hispanic admit line.
Have some big signs in Spanish and Farsi noting that the ICE Agent sitting in one of the folding chairs will help all immigrants to start the sign in process. The patients or the patients’s parents will need passports for care. Place the signs behind the Ice Agent and one in the vacant chair.
Of course a big ICE haul away van parked in the parking lot by the ER entrance will also help with that overload and those blatant enough to ignore the signs.
I know this is a bold prediction that some will see as ridiculous, but I maintain a major portion of that 14 million is made up of illegal aliens.
That five million figure is about as accurate as the estimate of only 10 million illegals in the entire U.S., stating we haven’t had any increase in the illegal alien population in the United States since 2000.
California just decided not to go forward with CalifornaCare, which would only have cost about $11K/yr for every Californian
This is most likely because with Medi-Cal (which is Medicaid) it is hard to find a doctor who will take you on as a patient ... and even if you do it is hard to get an appointment within a reasonable time frame.
So if your situation needs immediate attention you have no other choice.
Also, complaints that were not acute when you could have seen your doctor could become acute during the time you are waiting to see your doctor ... so you have no other choice but to go to the ER
Basically they did not solve the ER problem but in fact made it worse.
In addition to all that they added millions of people to the Medicaid rolls but there was not a corresponding addition of doctors, nurses, diagnostic labs, etc. All that was added is beaucoup numbers of bureaucrats and middle managers, which if you’re sick are of no help.
[400 billion dollars] ÷ [about 35 million Californians] = [about $11K per Californian].
I'm assuming the $400B was "per year," because if it wasn't it's for sure that the MSM-Democrats would have buried the startup costs and just given the sustaining costs, or said "$400 Billion over the next ten years," etc.
But they didn't.
Happy to report that she survived the experience and is now on blood pressure regulating meds.
The report illustrates the American taxpayer supporting the Mexican invader. The Mexican is coming to conquer us and we pay them.
Thanks. The link below helps. Interesting, when I did a Google search earlier, it only showed your comments.
CALIFORNIA DREAMING
Powerlineblog ^ | 06/24/2017 | Steve Hayward
Posted on 6/25/2017, 9:37:16 AM by DFG
Sadly for those of us hoping California would go full commie as an object lesson for the rest of the nation, the state legislature has shelved the proposed $400 billion single-payer health care bill. Democrats are naturally blaming Trump, because the scheme would require a bunch of waivers from the Administration to go into effect, but the real reason is that it’s a total lunatic idea, and there a just enough Democrats who recognize this. You might as well build a high speed rail up the middle of the state. Oh, wait. . .
Anyway, expect single-payer to come back as a central issue for the governor’s race next year. Likely front-runner Gavin Newsom will campaign for it, but interestingly one of his chief rivals, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has been tacking to the right (for a Democrat) perhaps in an attempt to position himself better against Newsom and his Bay Area base. Villaraigosa has been making some acerbic comments about “Tesla Democrats.” Could be some great blue-on-blue action next year.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3563976/posts
California was medically shafting itself back in 1980s. One of the articles in the WSJ had one story about a single mother, taking her kid to the ER for “something”, on a Friday, insisting they observe him for a few days, while she goes off to Las Vegas.
Another was about a wheelchair-bound elderly man that got a useless hip replacement for free, but balked at paying some portion for an updated pair of glasses so he could see better.
Priorities and incentives don’t go hand-in-hand when it comes to gub’mint.
The weekday day shifts tended to be pretty quiet.Evening shifts featured everything from heart attacks to gunshot wounds.The evening shifts also featured a lot of sniffles,colds,rashes,etc.IOW a 24/7 walk-in clinic.Ditto the night shifts.
At least 99% of the sniffles patients were welfare parasites who couldn't care less that the state was gonna be billed $800+ for their visit.
Life in Cali is an emergency.
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