Might as well misogynyFollow

I get that this is stated so often that it's assumed to be true, but it's just not.

No, it is. Not close, not in ANY WAY an open issue.

I get that this is stated so often that it's assumed to be true, but it's just not. The problem is that the two things aren't related in any significant way. It's like someone needed an emotion laden reason to get people on board with subsidizing general health insurance and they latched onto "people in emergency rooms" as the best they could come up with.

The percentage of emergency room visits which could be prevented by providing people with comprehensive health insurance (with "preventative care") is very close to zero. Most emergency room visits are the result of accidental injuries, or illnesses which can't be "prevented" by going to a doctor once or twice a year. All you're doing is increasing the total costs involved by paying for one thing which doesn't at all affect the cost of the other thing. People with health insurance still fall off ladders. Their children still get ear infections. And they go to urgent care (emergency rooms) for treatment, just the same as the uninsured do. The cost is the same. Only now you've introduced a middle man which will increase total costs.

About the only thing that can be consistently be shown to decrease total systemic health care costs via prevention is flu shots and vaccinations. And if someone proposed that we simply provide those for free, I'd have no problem with it. Because that would actually reduce our total health care costs. What was sold to the public as a cost saving measure was not only not, but arguably will result (must result) in increased total systemic health care costs. We were vastly better off cost-wise just absorbing the cost for the occasional emergency room visit by the uninsured than what we have now.