Quote:
Originally Posted by glatt
If you have no money and no health insurance now and are having a health crisis, you go to the ER and get treated there. You can't pay the bill, so the rest of us pay for it with higher hospital prices. Under Obamacare, you will have health insurance and go to a doctor instead. Maybe even sooner, where you will get it treated for a lower cost. Gross costs will go down.
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You're assuming certain behaviors (i.e. people who have health insurance will go to the doctor instead of using the ER for non-urgent problems), but many people prefer the ER for reasons I'd rather not get into. Unfortunately, costs will go down only if there's a penalty for using the ER when you could have gone to the doctor, and penalizing people for ER use is a tough political sell. More often, the hospital and/or doctors get penalized when people use the ER inappropriately. That saves money (if person A turns up five times in seven days and his/her insurance refuses to pay for more than the first visit) but results in hospitals closing ERs wherever possible.
(The disincentive in Ontario ERs is that in an urban center you'll typically wait 12+ hours or more to be seen. That's good for filtering out those who ought to go to an Urgent Care; not so good for those who are urgently/emergently sick. But I digress.)