The usually sensible Hill newspaper has a headline in its OnLine edition: "Health reform threatens to cram already overwhelmed emergency rooms."

It might have been better if,like, you know, they had bothered to splash that headline during the debate over health care reform when opponents were making that very point.

For example:

"Healthcare Reform Will Make Emergency Room Crowding Even Worse" said Joe Weisenthal in Business Insider article nearly two years ago. Or:

Robert Samuelson quoting a study just two weeks before reform passed showing that emergency room visits remained sky high after Massachusetts adopted Romneycare and the likelihood that such visits would increase under Obamacare.

The point being, why is The Hill's Jay Heflin reporting on the issue now?

The new healthcare law will pack 32 million newly insured people into emergency rooms already crammed beyond capacity, according to experts on healthcare facilities.

A chief aim of the new healthcare law was to take the pressure off emergency rooms by mandating that people either have insurance coverage. The idea was that if people have insurance, they will go to a doctor rather than putting off care until they faced an emergency.

People who build hospitals, however, say newly insured people will still go to emergency rooms for primary care because they don't have a doctor.

"Everybody expected that one of the initial impacts of reform would be less pressure on emergency departments; it's going to be exactly the opposite over the next four to eight years," said Rich Dallam, a healthcare partner at the architectural firm NBBJ, which designs healthcare facilities.

"We don't have the primary care infrastructure in place in America to cover the need. Our clients are looking at and preparing for more emergency department volume, not less," he said.

Is it news that some Democrats agree with this:

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) suspects the fallout that occurred in Massachusetts' emergency rooms could happen nationwide after health reform kicks in.

Massachusetts in 2006 created near-universal coverage for residents, which was supposed to ease the traffic in hospital emergency rooms.

But a recent poll by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that nearly two-thirds of the state's residents say emergency department wait times have either increased or remained the same.

A February 2010 report by The Council of State Governments found that wait times had not abated since the law took effect.

"That is not an unrealistic question about what's going to happen in the next four years as you bring all these people on; who are they going to see?" McDermott said.

To which opponents of Obamacare say "duh."

Sure would have been nice to see a piece like this in most media outlets prior to the vote on health care reform. If the people who are actually going to build hospitals tell us that there will be a massive increase in the number of people visiting emergency rooms, wouldn't it have been a good idea to let everyone in on the secret prior to passing this trillion dollar monstrosity?

Just asking...