So, a big new study was released this week on the expansion of Medicaid in Oregon. Turns out that greatly expanding health care access doesn't actually improve the health outcomes of those you expand it for. As Megan McArdle put it:
Bombshell news out of Oregon today: a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) of what happens to people when they gain Medicaid eligibility shows no impact on objective measures of health. Utilization went up, out-of-pocket expenditure went down, and the freqency of depression diagnoses was lower. But on the three important health measures they checked that we can measure objectively--glycated hemoglobin, a measure of blood sugar levels; blood pressure; and cholesterol levels--there was no significant improvement. ...
This study is a big, big deal.
Indeed it is! In addition to a litany of small giveaways to Democratic constituencies, Obamacare promised two big things: It would "bend the cost curve" down and it would make people healthier by increasing coverage. Turns out that Obamacare will not in fact address the high cost of medicine in the United States. There goes promise one. But promise number two seemed like a sure thing: If you give people access to healthcare they'll be healthier, right? Surely this is worth spending billions and billions and billions of dollars on, yes?
Well, no. As the new study shows, promise number two is also false. Drastically expanding access to healthcare does not appear to actually improve the health of people. And the cost of healthcare isn't going down. And employers are dropping coverage because of increased costs. And the states aren't setting up the healthcare exchanges, the main means by which people who did not have insurance were to receive insurance. Et cetera. Obamacare is a train wreck of epic proportions.
What is a blinkered partisan to do? Why, ignore the evidence, of course!
Over at Reason, Shikha Dalmia catalogues the somewhat hilarious reactions to the latest blow to Obamacare. (Update: Peter Suderman shows the difference in reactions to the first round of results—which suggested the Medicaid expansion was good—and the second round of results.) You can sum up the response like this: "No, you guys, just ignore what the study says about health outcomes and look at other things and oh by the way maybe health will improve later on in life?" It's something else.
At the risk of coming off as an engaged writer rather than a detached one, I guess the only question left is this: Why are liberals so committed to their ideological preconceptions that they are willing to ignore statistical proof that their ideological preconceptions are wrong? Indeed, why do Democrats hate science so much?