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Before Expanding Medicaid, Examine the Program’s Outcomes

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When Virginia lawmakers start cranking up the old Medicaid-expansion jalopy in January, they would be well advised to pay attention to a new study out of California — not exactly your reddest of red states, so this is not Republican propaganda.


The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology, used a California data registry to compare cancer survival outcomes of insurance over two decades (1997–2014). Summarizes the Federalist: “Improvements in survival rates during the time period the survey examined came almost exclusively from individuals with private insurance or Medicare. “[F]or patients with other public [i.e., Medicaid] or no insurance, survival was often stubbornly unchanged, or, in some cancers, declining.”


While survival falls short of that achieved by patients with private insurance, public insurance such as Medicaid does confer a survival benefit over no insurance for breast, prostate, and lung cancer. However, there was little or no benefit of public insurance over no insurance for colorectal cancer or melanoma, and the lack of improvement in survival is a concern. These findings suggest that the health care provided to publically [sic] insured patients with cancer in California is not adequately meeting their needs.


Got that? Medicaid is somewhat better than zero insurance for some cancers but no better for others. And in some cases, the study implies, it’s worse.


Meanwhile, debates are raging over whether Medicaid expansion has led to an increase in opioid addiction, and whether or not emergency-room usage has declined, as envisioned by the architects of the Affordable Care Act.


The assumption behind Medicaid expansion is that any health coverage, no matter how crappy, is better than none at all. But Medicaid reimburses physicians far less than private insurance and Medicare do, with the result that (a) many physicians don’t take Medicaid patients, and (b) some physicians may not provide the same quality of treatment. Also, one must consider the nature of Medicaid patients. By definition, they are poor, and poor people may interact with the health care system differently than the non-poor.
The California study inevitably will be cited by Virginia opponents to Medicaid expansion. And just as inevitably, supporters will find reasons to criticize it. Here’s how it works in early 21st-century America: Pick your desired political outcome, choose the study to justify it, and then shoot holes in opposing studies. Medical science becomes politicized just like everything else in our society that is mediated by the political class — but, of course, it’s all the other side’s fault.


(This article first ran in Bacon’s Rebellion on December 8, 2017.)


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