Shortage Of Physicians Able To See Medi-Cal Patients Contributing To Spike In ER Visits
The expansion of Medi-Cal under the Affordable Care Act was supposed to relieve stress on ERs, but it hasn't worked out quite as planned.
The Mercury News:
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. (Seipel, 6/21)
Sacramento Bee:
Millions Of Californians Could Lose Medi-Cal Coverage Under Republican Health Care Plan
For the first year in history, over half of all visits to Sacramento County’s emergency rooms in 2016 were paid for using Medi-Cal, the state’s insurance program for the poor that was expanded by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. So what happens to those people if Obamacare is repealed by the U.S. Congress? (Xu, 6/22)