Emergency room visits by Medi-Cal patients soaring, state data shows

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.

That’s pretty much the opposite of what architects of the nation’s health care law had predicted: The Obamacare provision expanding Medicaid was designed to get low-income people to start going to doctors in cost-efficient “managed care” plans.

The Affordable Care Act’s architects had predicted that enrolling more people in Medicaid (called Medi-Cal here) and then assigning each participant a primary care doctor would divert those patients with minor ailments — like the flu or urinary tract infections — away from the ER.

But struggles over accessing physicians or long delays for appointments, experts say, are among the reasons why Medi-Cal patients logged about 1.4 million visits to the ER in the last quarter of 2016. According to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, that’s up from around 1 million in 2014, when the Affordable Care Act took hold.

“The Affordable Care Act’s architects had predicted that enrolling more people in Medicaid (called Medi-Cal here) and then assigning each participant a primary care doctor would divert those patients with minor ailments — like the flu or urinary tract infections — away from the ER.”

This is not the stupidest statement I’ve heard today, but its close!

One of the major problems with insurance is it has to be paid for by people doing it right. The aspect of creating a pay for play use of the entitlement is all fine and dandy, if the sick people are willing to do it. Hate to say this, but a whole bundle of people aren’t.

The worst of it is in California. With the thousands of illegals getting sick and needing medical care, they can’t afford to come in and give name, address, phone number, or any type of information that can lead the authorities to them. So they don’t. They will sit in the ER all day if need be, and be treated by a doctor and either released or put in, with no information being transferred because the doctors have to treat them, period. But when it came time to pay, they just walked away.

And of course when others found out they didn’t have to pay for it and could get the same service, a trend was invented. It’s called, in my mind, almost free medical care. I say almost because someone will have to pay for it. It won’t be that patient. And the hospital will recoup their losses by charging more for services to the people that were playing the game properly.

So, that’s why it will cost them more money than they can afford to be treated. And when they can’t pay either and go bankrupt or disappear losing their homes, the state will step in and tax the rich more to cover the loss of closing hospitals. And if the state takes enough away, they will have to close businesses they can no longer afford and leave the state. Unemployment.

See the dominoes falling? And don’t say it can’t happen as it has in the past. Look at the results of California propositions 101 and 103 in the early eighties. It caused a number of insurance companies to vacate the state as they could no longer afford to do business in California. An excellent example. Oh, I forgot to mention, those companies that stayed were charging all drivers assigned risk rates to cover their losses. And if that’s all they charge, enough people had to pay it to keep their required insurance. But for those that didn’t see it possible to pay, they just dropped their insurance. And it was not a jail able offence, just a headache. And as the system ate itself, more and more couldn’t afford it. More dominoes, huh? It gets worse, but this is enough to start your imagination as to what can happen to health care as it eats itself financially. And it is going to happen. Just like proposition 101 and 103. Only this will be nationally, not just local. And with the previous experience, the libs knew it would happen. And that’s why they had to get the bill voted in to get it understood. Understand it now? I did already.

rwood

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