New study finds that Medicaid doesn’t improve health outcomes

by Jonathan Ingram Illinois lawmakers set to decide whether or not to adopt ObamaCare’s voluntary expansion of Medicaid may want to read a new study published in the Journal of New England Medicine. In 2008, Oregon officials wanted to expand eligibility for their Medicaid program, but only had enough funding for 10,000 of the 90,000 eligible...

by Jonathan Ingram

Illinois lawmakers set to decide whether or not to adopt ObamaCare’s voluntary expansion of Medicaid may want to read a new study published in the Journal of New England Medicine.

In 2008, Oregon officials wanted to expand eligibility for their Medicaid program, but only had enough funding for 10,000 of the 90,000 eligible people wanting to sign up. So they held a lottery. And thus the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment was born.

Health economists used this unique opportunity to create the first-ever randomized, controlled study of the effect of Medicaid on patients’ health. They would spend the next few years following those who won the lottery and those who did not to try and measure Medicaid’s impact.

So what did they find? After two years of tracking the participants, the researchers found that “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes.” These patients showed no significant improvements, despite the fact that the Medicaid group ended up using much more health care than the control group, including use of emergency rooms.

This is even more troubling for Illinois, given the fact that Oregon’s Medicaid program is in much better shape than our own. For starters, Oregon pays physicians about 30 percent more to treat Medicaid patients than Illinois does. It’s no surprise, then, that Illinois doctors are 1.7 times as likely as Oregon doctors to stop taking new Medicaid patients.

Researchers cannot find health improvements that stem from Oregon’s Medicaid program, which reimburses doctors at rates much higher than the national average. So how can Illinois lawmakers expect significant improvements from dumping hundreds of thousands of additional people into the state’s program, which has among the lowest reimbursement rates in the nation?

Instead of trying to segregate more people into a failing system, lawmakers should turn their attention to solving the very real issues in the Medicaid program today. They should be focused on fixing the program for the most vulnerable before they even think about piling hundreds of thousands of able-bodied, childless adults onto a safety net already ripping at the seams.