NICK KRISTOF: We Liberals May Have Overstated How Great Health Insurance Is
Expansion of health insurance to everyone has been a primary liberal goal for decades.
And with Obamacare on the verge of implementation (things really got going last year) that outcome is closer than ever.
So in that context here are two interesting tweets from liberal NYT columnist Nick Kristoff:
The "Oregon Study" he's referring to is a landmark study that came out just this week (published in the New England Journal of Medicine) which found that expanded Medicaid may help the financial well being of those who get coverage, but that there aren't very big physical health results.
This isn't a big surprise to people who have followed the debate closely for a long time.
As Ross Douthat points out in the NYT, there have been studies showing this exact phenomenon before:
IN one of the most famous studies of health insurance, conducted across the 1970s, thousands of participants were divided into five groups, with each receiving a different amount of insurance coverage. The study, run by the RAND Corporation, tracked the medical care each group sought out, and not surprisingly found that people with more comprehensive coverage tended to make use of it, visiting the doctor and checking into the hospital more often than people with less generous insurance.
But the study also tracked the health outcomes of each group, and there the results were more surprising: With a few modest exceptions, the level of insurance had no significant effect on the participants’ actual wellness.
That health care coverage does not necessarily equate to better health does not undermine the importance of health care. Paul Krugman snarked this week that fire insurance must be worthless, since it doesn't prevent fires.
Still, the latest study has revived the notion that perhaps health care should be more focused around preventing catastrophic financial outcomes, rather than providing a means for people to see the doctor more on someone else's tab. Alas, with Obamacare about to be implemented, that debate might be irrelevant.