In the run up to the expansion of Medicaid by states, some of the fecal matter flung at the wall by anti-Obama types was that, if Medicaid expansion took hold, the system would be overwhelmed and collapse under the burden of all those new people actually getting access to affordable health care. In Michigan, Gov. Snyder, who eventually DID sign Medicaid expansion into law, actually used that as an excuse for considering vetoing the bill:
The key issue on the Medicaid expansion that I want to do some research on, among others, is do we have enough capacity to put essentially 400,000 more people into a medical home model with a primary care environment, as opposed to having them simply go to an ER?
In other words, we can't have nice things, at least not in Michigan.
However, a new report out of the University of Michigan shows that not only was this fear unfounded, for Medicaid patients, the availability of appointments is actually BETTER now than before the expansion. For those with private insurance, it's essentially the same.
Amy Lynn Smith at Eclectablog has the story:
Once again, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is proving its critics wrong. Opponents of the ACA, or Obamacare, have been falling all over themselves proclaiming that an influx of new patients will overburden the healthcare system, creating a dire doctor shortage.
At least in Michigan, that’s not happening.
A new University of Michigan study shows that the availability of primary care appointments actually improved for people with Medicaid in the first months after the state launched the Healthy Michigan Plan, the state’s Medicaid expansion under the ACA. What’s more, it remained mostly unchanged for those with private insurance.
In a paper published in the journal Health Affairs, the team from the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation reports the results of a “secret shopper” study that measured the availability of primary care appointments.
Research team members called hundreds of clinics posing as relatively healthy patients looking for a routine checkup with a new health provider. For those who said they had Medicaid, 49 percent of clinics offered an appointment before the expansion and 55 percent offered an appointment after expansion. For those who posed as patients with private insurance, 88 percent of clinics said they could take them before expansion and 86 percent said they could after expansion.
Chalk this up as one more Obamacare myth busted.