Getting aid is not the same as having coverage and getting care.
Yeah, anyone can show up to a free clinic but that doesn't come close to covering the need. And it doesn't stop the masses from showing up at the ER when they should have had a normal doctor treating their ailments long before it reached crisis level.
Then factor in the multitudes that don't qualify for medicaid (pre-obamacare). Now they do.
lolwtf - 100 millions americans don't have jobs because OBAMA
come on dude
Did you actually read the Forbes article?
It wasn't free clinics! Medicaid paid for health care for them. In fact, far more physicians could accept Medicaid because back then so many people had healthcare through private insurance and so the doctors could take a hit. Earlier there was a greater reimbursement for physicians as an incentive to accept it.
I wonder if some people have actually operated a business? Imagine you're waiting to get a paycheck. Your boss says, "Hey, we're only going to give you a fourth of what we used to pay you. We're doing it to cut costs. Sorry.
Imagine a plumber comes to your home and gives you a bill. You write him a check for 25% of what's on the work order. He'd be incensed!
But sure, no problem, these fat cat rich docs can afford to take a hit over and over. That won't affect their office staff's salaries any.
And when people figure out that you can give people healthcare all day long, but that they're not enough medical staff for all of these new people. What will happen then?
In American history, the way health insurance used to work was it divided up the healthcare premium costs by averaging it over a community. You shared the risk with your neighbors. But then some bright insurance company decided to use actuaries to measure the incidence of use based upon age and sex and then offered cheaper insurance to these folks and raised the rates of healthcare insurance based upon risk. It meant they could charge more for patients with preexisting conditions (but they didn't exclude them from coverage) but it made it very pricey for some.
Some young people skipped health insurance altogether, because there was a very low chance of them needing versus just paying out of pocket. Since young people don't typically get sick, then as long as they didn't say have an accidental fall and break a bone, then they might have no healthcare costs in a given year.
When there are no young healthy adults putting money in a health insurance system, it makes it even more expensive for those who are paying premiums as this cuts into the profits of the insurance company (they're not getting the cushy money from the ones who have a very low statistical chance of getting hurt or ill).
A big aspect of the high costs was this policy switch.
Want to lower healthcare costs? Get people to live healthier. You're always going to have some portion of the population with a surprise case of leukemia, or a sudden diagnosis of kidney disease, but many healthcare costs can be totally preventable. People in the US are not healthy anymore for diverse reasons like increasing portion size, the kinds of foods we eat, the high amounts of sugar in everything, high fructose corn syrup, etc.
Did you know that much of breast cancer could be detected very early and significantly reduce costs for it and SAVE LIVES? That goes for many of the top common health issues here. But we can't do that if we cut corners on things like medical testing (a criticism of this was in the youtube video who made the claim we order too many tests!) actually we need more testing but only when there's some indication for doing it. If we find a middle way, then we could made a monumental difference in the lives of patients and in their families.
You can't just throw money at an issue, expect the doctors to take a hit, lie to the American people about the real costs, add many more illegals into the system (for even if they don't get healthcare, their situation means deep economic instability and a need to visit medical centers and an inability to pay). It's complex and that's why we passed Obamacare in a very inadvised way at a time of extreme fragility in the American economy.
It's a feel good move. I'd bet that many people who enrolled could have easily gotten Medicaid prior to the passage if they'd only applied. As such, it was unnecessary as something to assist the indigent.
Economic security means better meaningful jobs that have benefits, and had we worked on THAT, then we'd be able to give people healthcare by that vehicle, and not just add more people to the Medicaid roles. If you read the link I posted from the official Obamacare website, a very large part of the new enrollees were Medicaid enrollees.