I guess this part of the cost curve isn’t bending down the way we were promised. From 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.

“Eighty-six percent of emergency doctors expect visits to rise over the next three years, though the email survey didn't ask the doctors why.

“Democrats who designed the 2010 health law hoped it would do the opposite. They wanted to give the uninsured better access to primary-care doctors who could treat routine ailments and prevent chronic disease, with the intent of keeping patients out of the ER and lowering the cost of care. The median ER charge was more than $1,200 for the most frequent outpatient diagnoses in a study of over 8,000 ER visits in 2006-08, said a 2013 report funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

“Instead, the ER doctor group's research and several other recent studies suggest that people who gain private and government insurance are more likely to seek emergency care.”

The story quotes some experts saying it’s too soon for a trend and it’s not necessarily Obamacare’s fault and other clichés meant to make us not notice the “Affordable” Care Act is an Orwellian misnomer. One expert, a physician who’s now in Congress, cuts through the double-talk:

“Rep. Michael Burgess (R., Texas), a former OB-GYN, said he wasn't surprised by the findings. ‘It was a specious argument’ that the law would reduce ER use, he said.”

And yet Obamacare supporters used that argument to sell their scheme. Makes you wonder about the rest of their pitch.