Unfortunately, the second wave study,
published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is gated, so
I am relying on the abstract and a summary by Aaron Carroll and
Austin Frakt in The Incidental Economist blog.
The corporate media are spinning the
second wave study as showing Medicaid expansion to be a failure. For
example the New York Times says:
It found that
those who gained Medicaid coverage spent more on health care, making
more visits to doctors and trips to the hospital. But the study
suggests that Medicaid coverage did not make those adults much
healthier, at least within the time frame of the research . . .
Later the article notes that Medicaid
expansion under the Affordable Care Act will be costly. “Health
economists anticipate that new enrollees to the Medicaid program will
swell the country's health spending costs by hundreds of billions of
dollars over time,” it warns. If you go online and check the
comments following any article about the study, you'll find that it
has unleashed a torrent of criticism from the political right claiming that
providing health care for the poor is a waste of money. The study is
certain to be used by Republicans such as Pennsylvania Governor Tom
Corbett to justify their opposition to Medicaid expansion.
So what does the second wave study
actually show? First, the bad news. The three objective indicators of
physical health, blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar level,
were all lower in the Medicaid group than the control group, but the
differences were not statistically significant. Here are the data. (HDL is “good”
cholesterol, so the fact that there are fewer people with low HDL
cholesterol in the Medicaid group is a good outcome. High hemoglobin A1c is high blood sugar.)
Now the good news. Medicaid reduced
the incidence of depression by 30%, which was statistically
significant. It also significantly increased preventive care,
including a 50% increase in cholesterol monitoring, a doubling of
mammograms, and an increased likelihood of being diagnosed with
diabetes.
Finally, the economic news. Health
care spending was 35% higher in the Medicaid group. Of course,
Medicaid practically eliminates catastrophic medical costs. As a
result, the Medicaid recipients were significantly less likely to
report borrowing money or skipping other bills in order to pay
medical expenses.
There are several reasons we should not
accept the conservative rush to judgment that this study shows that Medicaid
is not helpful.
- Medicaid recipients were healthier on all three measures of physical health. The problem is that the differences were not statistically significant. There are several reasons why that might be the case, but the most likely is that the sample sizes were too small to detect the effect. The authors state:[O]ur power to detect changes in health was limited by the relatively small numbers of patients with these conditions; indeed, the only condition in which we detected improvements was depression, which was by far the most prevalent of the four conditions examined. The 95% confidence intervals for many of the estimates of effects on individual physical health were wide enough to include changes that would be considered clinically significant . . .
- These data were collected only two years after the program began. The significant differences in preventive care suggest that greater differences in health might emerge in later waves of the study.
- Mental health is also health, and significant differences in depression should not be dismissed as unimportant. Financial hardship also matters, and its absence may be related to the lower incidence of depression in the Medicaid group.
- There is no comparable study of the health effects of private health insurance, so these data should not be used to infer that Medicaid is any more expensive or less effective than private insurance.
Let's do a thought experiment.
Suppose you had a private health insurance policy, researchers did a
study to evaluate its health effects that was comparable in size,
duration and design to the Oregon study, and obtained identical
results. That is, the policy holders' health was better, but not
significantly better than people
without insurance. Would
you cancel your policy? One of the reasons people buy health
insurance may be that they think it will make them healthier, but it
is my guess that the primary reason people in this country
buy health insurance is to guard against the financial consequences
of catastrophic illness.
You may also be interested in reading:
Tom Corbett to PA's Working Poor: “Drop Dead!” Part 1. Medicaid improves Health and Saves Lives.
Tom Corbett to PA's Working Poor: “Drop Dead!” Part 3. What Medicaid Expansion Would Mean to
Pennsylvania