Obamacare has resulted in an increase in the use of emergency rooms in California, the study found -- not a decrease, as promised.

Liberals have cited California as the prototypical Obamacare success story for years now, but a new study puts that assertion very much in doubt. Five years ago, even before Obamacare’s exchanges went live, The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claimed California would prove that “a program designed to help a lot of people can, strange to say, end up helping a lot of people — especially when government officials actually try to make it work.”

Reporters have chimed in with similar stories about Obamacare’s supposed success in California. During the presidential campaign in 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported that “California is emerging as a clear illustration of what the law can achieve.” The article quoted several insurers saying the state “did it right,” and had created stable insurance markets.

Whether explicit or implicit, these and articles like them have presented a consistent theme: Absent Republican “sabotage” — less present in a Democratic-dominated state like California — Obamacare would have delivered on its promises much more effectively. These make a study published last week casting doubt on whether California has delivered on one of its central promises of particular note.

Emergency Rooms Are Getting More, Not Less, Use

The study, conducted by the California Health Care Foundation, examined emergency department usage over the ten years from 2006 to 2016. While the report, perhaps quite deliberately, didn’t highlight this conclusion — it mentioned Obamacare once, and only in passing — the data indicate that emergency department usage since Obamacare has not only not decreased, it has accelerated, rising at a faster rate than in prior years.

One chart tells the tale:

The chart shows a trend line of generally increasing ER usage throughout the decade. But examining the numbers at the bottom of the chart, which track visits per 1,000 individuals — a metric that adjusts for changes in the state’s population — demonstrates the impact of Obamacare. In the four years from 2013, the year before Obamacare’s full implementation, through 2016, ER visits rose by 39 per 1,000 patients. By comparison, in the six years from 2008 through 2013 — a period coinciding with the Great Recession, which saw many Americans lose their jobs, and with it their employer-sponsored health insurance — ER visits rose by only 38 per 1,000 patients.

The study indicates that ER usage accelerated in the years immediately following Obamacare’s implementation, just as it shows Medicaid patients comprised a larger share of ER visits. From 2006 through 2016, Medicaid patients nearly doubled as a share of ER visitors, while ER visitors with private insurance and no insurance both declined:

Unfortunately, this chart does not reveal data for the years immediately before and after Obamacare implementation in 2014, making it tougher to draw direct conclusions. However, the 20 percentage point increase in ER visits by Medicaid patients (California calls its Medicaid program “Medi-Cal”) more than outweighs the 9 percentage point decline in self-pay and uninsured patients and the 4 percentage point decline in patients with other forms of coverage.

Translating the percentages into specific numbers makes the story clearer, as nearly 90 percent of the increase in the number of ER visits from the years 2006 through 2016 comes from Medicaid patients:

While private patients’ ER usage held relatively flat over the decade, the nearly 4 million increase in ER visits by Medicaid patients swamped the combined 863,000 fewer visits by self-pay and uninsured patients and patients with other coverage.

To put it bluntly, the raw data from the California study suggest the state has less of a problem with an overall increase in ER visits and much more of a problem with an explosion in Medicaid patient ER visits. That inconvenient truth might explain why the California Health Care Foundation didn’t highlight the impact of Medicaid, or Obamacare’s expansion of it, in the report itself.

California Study Echoes Oregon ‘Experiment’

The California study echoes similar findings from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment several years ago. That study, conducted prior to Obamacare’s full implementation, compared the results and behavior of a group of individuals randomly selected to participate in Medicaid expansion in that state to individuals who did not participate in the expansion.

In 2016, a group of economists released an updated analysis from Oregon, which concluded that ER usage increased, not decreased, by 40 percent for participants in the Medicaid expansion. The increased ER usage persisted for at least two years, making it unlikely that it existed solely due to “pent-up demand” — i.e., individuals using their new insurance coverage to have lingering but previously untreated problems examined.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that giving patients a more normal source of coverage would decrease ER utilization, the Oregon study found that usage of health care services increased across-the-board, including emergency department visits.

The California study did not reveal whether access problems resulted in the 170 percent increase in ER visits by Medicaid patients. The state has notoriously stingy payment rates for Medicaid providers, which could impede patients from accessing primary care, forcing them to use the emergency room instead.

At minimum, however, the study once again demonstrates how Obamacare has failed to deliver on its promise to lower the cost of health care by providing that care in a more timely fashion and at the most efficient location. The increase in ER usage by Medicaid patients also raises questions about whether an insurance card provides access to actual health care.

Five years ago, I wrote about how Krugman’s claims of California’s Obamacare success echoed The Mamas and the Papas: little more than California Dreamin’. Last week’s study reiterates how liberal claims that the state represents an Obamacare “success story” remain nothing more than a pipe dream.