RE: the myth of "emergency room health care" and why ObamaCare won't fix that
In order to gain support for the ACA, the administration claimed the country had an otherwise unsolvable problem. To wit, emergency rooms provide free care, which is helping to drive health costs through the roof. This morphed into a narrative that everyone without insurance gets free care in emergency rooms, and this is the reason they are costly and crowded. Of course, the proposed ACA was the only way to fix this problem, they said, by mandating that everyone is insured. The administration was so wedded to this narrative that they used it prominently in their legal briefs to the federal courts when the law was challenged. Furthermore, this is not a new line of propaganda. Mitt Romney and his liberal friends who designed Romneycare used the same rationale. They projected big savings from emergency room costs paid by taxpayers.
Of course, the propaganda about emergency room free care doesn't match with reality. It is a fundamental misconception that people who go to the emergency room aren't being charged for their emergency room visits.. The reality is that everybody is charged.
- Some have their insurance company pay it.
- Some have their medicare/medicaid coverage pay it.
- Some get a bill and pay it out of pocket.
- And some get a bill and don't immediately pay it.
Those who get a bill and don't pay it are typically pursued by bill collectors until they work out a payment plan. Only when the collection process fails is the cost absorbed by the hospital and the taxpayers. This represents a minority percentage of emergency room visits nationally.
Of those who end up walking away scot free, most are low income (who are eligible for medicaid but have never bothered to sign up) and illegal immigrants, who by statute must be treated.
So while the liberal propagandists perpetuate the myth that we are all ripping off the free emergency room system, the reality is that two well defined categories of people are the primary ones getting free care. And the insurance mandate does not address it.
But the propaganda beat continues. Kathleen Sebelius went on Jon Stewart Monday night and again provided a false rationale for the ACA mandate ("The rules of the country are you go through the doors of an emergency room, you get treated, and somebody else picks up that bill.") while Stewart nodded his ignorant head. |
