This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 7, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama used to argue that expanding Medicaid would reduce emergency room use and thus saving taxpayers money.

Now the famed Oregon Health Insurance Experiment is showing evidence to the contrary.

Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies, at the Cato Institute,

evaluates the likely impact.

What did the Obama administration say was going to be the result of getting more Americans health insurance.

President Obama himself repeatedly told the American people

that if we enroll more people in health insurance, more people will get preventive

care, they'll get primary care, and we will keep people out of emergency rooms.

And therefore, that will reduce health care spending on emergency rooms and that will help pay for the law because we are catching these diseases earlier and saving people from having to use the emergency room

as their source of primary care.

Now, emergency rooms are net loss for hospitals, aren't they?

That's actually unclear because they will certainly say that they have uncompensated care,

uncompensated losses, bad debt that comes in through the emergency room, people who don't have health insurance, don't pay their bills. Sometimes people who do't have health insurance don't pay their

part of the co-payment.

But there have been studies that show that in many cases the uninsured who do pay their bills pay so much more that they make up for

the uninsured who don't so it's really sort of a difficult question certainly

there are bad debts in hospitals but there are bad debts in every industry.

What have we learned from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment about providing health

insurance to people and the use of emergency room care?

What we've learned is that what President Obama said about health insurance reducing emergency

...