Medicaid: The limits of health care

We now know what Medicaid is good for—almost nothing, said James Pethokoukis in BusinessInsider.com. That’s the unavoidable conclusion of a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which compared thousands of low-income Oregon residents enrolled in the government medical insurance program with ones who were not. Researchers noted that Medicaid recipients suffered less financial strain and depression than the uninsured. But when it came to three crucial measures of physical well-being—blood sugar levels, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels—the health care provided through Medicaid made no difference. This study should prove to everyone that Obamacare is bad medicine, said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com. Beginning next year, the Affordable Care Act will spend $1 trillion to insure some 30 million people, half of whom will be enrolled in Medicaid. “If expanded coverage doesn’t make us healthier, then the entire premise underlying Obamacare is wrong.”

Did you “read the same study that I did?” asked Jonathan Cohn in NewRepublic.com. It’s true that Medicaid didn’t improve recipients’ physical health over a short, two-year period. But the other big finding was that “Medicaid virtually wiped out crippling medical expenses among the poor.” The percentage of people who faced catastrophic medical expenditures—more than 30 percent of their annual income—dropped from 5 percent to 1 percent. Medicaid enrollees were also about half as likely to suffer from other forms of financial strain, like delaying payments on other bills because of medical costs. Most Americans who can afford a health plan buy one precisely because they don’t want to absorb the high cost of medical care, said Kevin Drum in MotherJones.com. And if insurance against devastating medical costs is “a good thing for us middle-class types, it’s a good thing for poor people too.”

Still, Obamacare’s supporters—including me—have to admit that the study’s findings are discouraging, said Ray Fisman in Slate.com. Providing access to medical care, it seems, doesn’t ensure better health. How do doctors fight heart disease and diabetes if patients stuff themselves with junk and never get off the couch? Persuading millions of Americans to change their unhealthy habits is a tall order—one that can “make the Affordable Care Act, despite its enormous ambitions, seem almost too timid or narrow in its focus.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up