Overwhelmed: Number of ER Visits Has Spiked Significantly Since Obamacare

Photo by: Tetra Images/AP Images

From a recent report by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP):

Three-quarters of emergency physicians report that emergency visits are going up, according to a new poll. This represents a significant increase from just one year ago when less than half reported increases…

…Most of the respondents to the poll report little or no reductions in the volume of emergency visits due to the availability of urgent care centers, retail clinics and telephone triage lines. About 90 percent of more than 2,000 respondents also say the severity of illness or injury among emergency patients has either increased (44 percent) or remained the same (42 percent).

Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to solve the problem of people going to the ER for routine medical problems? We were told that if everyone had “healthcare” — either through the ACA exchanges or through Medicaid expansion — people would be able to go to their family doctors for routine care and emergency rooms would no longer be overrun by individuals who aren’t actually experiencing emergencies.

As it turns out, Medicaid patients can’t get appointments with physicians.

“America has severe primary care physician shortages, and many physicians will not accept Medicaid patients because Medicaid pays so inadequately,” said Michael Gerardi, MD, FAAP, FACEP, president of the ACEP.

The report — commissioned by the Emergency Medicine Action Fund — found that the median wait time to see a physician in the Medicaid managed care plan is two weeks but over one-quarter of the providers had a wait time of more than a month for an appointment.

As predicted, adding millions of able-bodied, working adults (most of whom who don’t have children) to the already overburdened Medicaid rolls is putting the most vulnerable in our society at risk — and it hasn’t even fixed most of the problems it promised to solve.

“Just because people have health insurance does not mean they have access to timely medical care,” Gerardi said.

That’s what we’ve been saying. Obamacare ≠ health care. It simply gave the nanny state do-gooders a reason to pat themselves on the backs for doing something to “fix health care,” when in reality all they did was generate thousands of pages of regulations that are decimating our nation’s health care system from the ground up.