Medicaid is a welfare program jointly funded by federal and state governments, which claims to provide health insurance to low income people. A few years ago, Oregon expanded Medicaid enrollment by lottery. This created an excellent environment to study the effects of being uninsured versus being enrolled in Medicaid, because it approximated a randomized-controlled trial — the gold standard of medical research, but seldom conducted in the social sciences.
The latest result of the study, published in Science, reported that Medicaid increased use of emergency rooms by 40 percent. This is not really news: It confirms results we have seen for at least forty years in different jurisdictions.
Read the entire column at John Goodman's Health Policy Blog or The Independent Institute's Beacon blog.
Research and commentary from a former senior executive in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
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