When the Left was trying to sell us on Obamacare they said this (emphasis mine):

“As far back as 2010, President Obama cited decreasing emergency room visits as one of the main cost-saving goals of the health-care reform. “What happens is, you don’t have health insurance, you go to the emergency room,” he said. “You weren’t getting a checkup; something that might have been curable with some antibiotics isn’t caught. By the time you get to the hospital, it’s much more expensive…We’re a lot better off if we are making sure that everybody is getting preventive care.”

“And earlier this year on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, accused Republicans seeking to repeal the health-care law of trying to “force millions of American families to once again rely on expensive emergency room care—or go without care at all.”

In a previous post I highlighted where the producer of the Rachel Maddow show claimed that Obamacare (which has added hundreds of thousands to Medicaid) will drive healthcare costs down by reducing ER visits.

But then I produced this graph which totally destroyed that argument because this shows healthcare costs rising as Medicare/Medicaid spending increases.

Now we have another study that further proves the Obamacare lie that ER visits will decrease once more people have insurance. From the Wall-Street Journal:

“Early evidence suggests that emergency rooms have become busier since the Affordable Care Act expanded insurance coverage this year, despite the law’s goal of reducing unnecessary care in ERs.”

“Almost half of ER doctors say they are seeing more patients since key provisions of the health law took effect Jan. 1, while more than a quarter say their patient volume has remained the same, according to a survey to be released Wednesday by the American College of Emergency Physicians.”

Obamacare is turning out like most of the Left’s policies – The theory sounds good but reality never quite lives up to expectations.

Idealistic Leftists thought that that people who lack the motivation to obtain an education level that would afford them a good job and allow them to buy health insurance would, after obtaining free healthcare, suddenly become very proactive and seek preventative care instead of waiting until it is too late and having to make a trip to the costly ER.

But that didn’t happen. And now we will all pay the price for the mistaken utopian policies of the Left.