Medicaid malfunctions: more emergency room visits.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Citings - Brief article

When President Obama pitched his health care overhaul in 2008 and 2009, he repeatedly argued that the existing health system relied too heavily on emergency room usage by the uninsured, which drove up the cost of care for everyone else. "If there are affordable options and people still don't sign up for health insurance, it means we pay for those people's expensive emergency room visits," he said in one speech promoting the law.

But the argument that emergency room usage could be reduced by passing the health law never quite held up. After Massachusetts enacted a similar health law several years earlier, emergency room visits increased. Obama's health reform relied heavily on an expansion of Medicaid, the joint federal-state health program for the poor and disabled--but Medicaid recipients typically used the emergency room far more than other types of patients.

In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that states could choose whether or not to expand Medicaid under the law without fear of losing their existing federal funding...