“I think a lot of people shared our hope that when you gave people access to Medicaid, they would go to the doctor, get preventive care and not need to go to the emergency department,” said Katherine Baicker, a health economics professor at Harvard. “That’s a reasonable hope.”…

But instead of pulling back on emergency room care, the newly insured now have a plan to pay for those visits so they’re not responsible for the entire bill. And that seems to be driving the change in patient load, at least for now…

“People could go less because they can visit a primary care doctor, or they could go more because the emergency department is now more affordable,” she said.