For three years, an incredibly nerdy—but consequential—debate has raged among health policy researchers regarding Medicaid, America’s government-run health-care program for the poor. Piles of studies have shown that people on Medicaid have health outcomes that are no better, and often worse, than those with no insurance at all. But supporters of Obamacare were cheered in 2011 when a lone study, out of Oregon, purported to show that Medicaid was better than being uninsured. Yesterday, however, the authors of the Oregon study published their updated, two-year results, finding that Medicaid “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes.” The result calls into question the $450 billion a year we spend on Medicaid, and the fact that Obamacare throws 11 million more Americans into this broken program.
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