Jonathan Cohn, TNR: Romney’s New Health Plan: Go to the ER
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/107666/romney-60-minutes-emergency-room-uninsured-obamacare-repeal
Fifty million Americans have no health insurance. Does government have an obligation to help them? The answer is no, Mitt Romney suggested during a 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday, in part because people can already get care through emergency rooms:
We do provide care for people who dont have insurance, peopleweif someone has a heart attack, they dont sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care.
That statement isnt untrue. But it leaves out an awful lot. ERs are great if you need urgent help with a major medical problem: Youve had a heart attack, youve been in an accident, whatever. And, yes, hospitals will generally treat you regardless of insurance status, if only because the law requires it. As a condition of accepting Medicare money, hospitals must provide stabilizing or life-saving treatment. But they will not provide basic, ongoing care. They will charge a lot of money for their services. In many cases they will do their best to collect on outstanding bills, even if that means using techniques that even the retail industry eschews as overly harsh. And sometimes, as Sarah Kliff notes today, hospitals find ways to avoid providing care in the first place.
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And thats really the most important point of all. Remember, Romney doesnt simply want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, effectively taking health insurance away from 30 million people who, starting in 2014, are likely to get it from the law. He also wants to end Medicaid, making cuts that would leave between 14 and 27 million additional people without insurance. And he wants to change the tax treatment of employer health benefits, in ways that could make coverage more expensive or harder to get.
Romneys strategy for health care isnt repeal and replace, as he sometimes likes to say. Its repeal and reverse, as my colleague Ed Kilgore has called it. And it'd leave the ERs even more inundated than they are now.
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