According to Reuters hospitals in the United States of America will save over $5.7 billion thanks to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Because of the ability of people to go into a marketplace and choose their own healthcare provider, people who in the past have been unable to find affordable care were able to get coverage. This has resulted in hospitals continuing to give service to patients they would already be seeing — only without absorbing the cost of the care and giving it back to the taxpayers!
Hospitals are not allowed to turn people away who come to their emergency rooms with health issues according to the Emergency Medical and Labor Treatment Act, which is a good thing. But the downside to this is that many uninsured people who seek medical assistance, they not only need but so rightfully deserve , cause the rising cost of health insurance to go up – as the cost for their treatment is passed onto other paying customers, who in turn have their insurance companies pay the majority portion of it……..who in turn raise premiums on all their insured customers.
Almost three-quarters of the $5.7 billion savings is due to the medicaid expansion. The states that opted-in for the medicaid expansion, offering healthcare to those to poor to afford it themselves, and saved hospitals an estimated $4.2 billion. Yeah, that’s billions with a “B”!!!
Hopefully, the mathematically-challenged Republican state legislatures and their yokel idiot Rethuglican governors get the memo. Maybe it will finally cull them into accepting the medicaid expansion for the remaining 23 states that have staunchly refused to accept, despite striking empirical evidence offered as proof that Obamacare WORKS!!!
Ideology aside, this has got to be the most effective means of showing that the Affordable Care Act works and is a good thing. The poor have been treated as second-class citizens for so long, and then punished when they reach a threshold – just barely rising above the poverty level – that many find the road to the middle class littered with land mines. Some find it not worth the risk as they suddenly find themselves jettisoned down a path of perpetual poverty, despite working 80+hours a week. The message is clear that the 27 states who opted into the medicaid expansion: it is a roaring success and needs to be enacted in the rest of the nation where MILLIONS of poverty-stricken Americans are lingering without affordable healthcare.
According to Sylvia Matthews Burwell, the success of Sebelius and current Secretary of Health and Human Services
“We’re now at a phase where we’re actually going to start seeing the benefits. It’s actually showing that this provides benefits to states.”
h/t trust.org
