From The "Stu Blog" 12Mar10

Obama gaffe gets retroactively dumber

So, we all remember this super-super classic…don’t we?  It’s worth watching again…

“Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. I haven’t had much sleep in the last 48 hours.”

Up until now, this has been funny just because of the supposedly brilliant President butchering the language. It’s also been used as a prime piece of evidence in the “imagine if George W. Bush did this” file.

Today, it gets retroactively worse.

Forget about the speaking problems here for a second, and think about what he’s actually saying. It’s one of many times he’s made the case that unneeded trips to the emergency room are a major factor in the high cost of health care. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for him—somebody took the time to look into it:

E.R. care represents less than 3 percent of healthcare spending, only 12 percent of E.R. visits are non-urgent, and the majority of E.R. patients are insured U.S. citizens, not uninsured, illegal immigrants.

So, if we were to completely eliminate non-urgent E.R. visits (which of course would be completely impossible), you’re looking at a savings of around 0.4% of health care spending. It’s actually less than that, because I’m not accounting for the higher relative cost of urgent visits, useful non-urgent care in off-hours, or the fact that most of the care is for the insured—but I’m feeling really generous.

Also, Massachusetts has shown us that Obama style health care doesn’t work to lighten the load on our emergency rooms. Even though easing the burden and costs of the E.R. was used as a main selling point for universal health care in Massachusetts—there has been a significant increase in both the number of E.R. visits and overall E.R. costs since its implementation.

It’s enough to make you reach for your breathalyzer…or….inhalator. Sorry, I haven’t had too much sleep in the last 15 months or so.