How much does Medicaid improve the poor’s well-being? Not much
But it’s hard to believe that the effect is really huge, precisely because the data tends to be so ambiguous. As Michael Cannon points out, this is the most vulnerable population–adults, many of them near-elderly, below the poverty line. This is where you’d expect to see the biggest effect of putting people on government insurance, because this group has very little recourse to alternative health care resources such as employer insurance, or paying out of pocket. (Though some of them seem to have found some anyway; as I make their somewhat confusing tables, 13% of the control group ended up on private insurance.)
I think this really points up the difficulty of finding good measures of “health”. We can come up with all sorts of objective measures, but we have to keep asking ourselves, relentlessly, whether what we’re actually measuring is good or bad: is higher utilization of services really improving peoples’ lives? Is lowering easily-measurable blood-cholesterol levels, at the risk of muscle atrophy, an improvement in health, and if so, how much? With some exceptions, the easiest things to measure are not necessarily the most important things to well-being.
This has implications for whether or not we should have a public health plan–is it worth the cost to make people feel happier about their insurance status, or protect them from uncollected medical bills rather than certain death? But it also has implications for how we’re going to structure the systems we have.
Blowback
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Racist.
lorien1973 on July 8, 2011 at 4:53 PM
And this
Schadenfreude on July 8, 2011 at 5:02 PM
So when people who don’t take care of themselves in the first place are given taxpayer funded health care they still get just as sick due to their own lifestyle choices as if we gave them no health care at all… Weird!
batterup on July 8, 2011 at 5:07 PM
This calls for more government intervention!
These people clearly need to be complete wards of the state!
/sarc
gwelf on July 8, 2011 at 5:10 PM
Here’s the thing that matters though. The goal isn’t to give them health insurance or improve their health … the goal is to give them something, and at election time say the Republicans want to take it away so vote democrat.
darwin on July 8, 2011 at 5:19 PM
I work for a home health care agency and we take care of all sorts of people. We have people on medicare and medicaid and private pay and insurance and veterans.
One of the people we have on medicaid is a young man who broke his neck in an accident. He was athletic and he had a job and he had a future. Now he is a quadriplegic. His meds alone costs more than $600 a month. I have also seen older people who took very good care of themselves who ended up on medicaid after they had already liquidated their assets to pay for their care. The nursing homes are full of people like this.
I am not a huge advocate of government run health care or anything, and no doubt there are people on medicaid who abuse the system. That will happen with any government system..but a lot of the people on medicaid are either elderly or chronically ill and have simply used up all other resources. They are not just people who have always been poor and who do not take care of themselves.
Terrye on July 8, 2011 at 5:33 PM
My question is where are the families? Families should take care of their own. Instead, they have abdicated responsibility and turned it over to the government. Granted there will always be some people who have no one and therefore will require assistance, but having the government (tax payer) be responsible for each and every individual is absurd.
darwin on July 8, 2011 at 5:51 PM