MEDICAID’S AWFUL RESULTS

As the Obamacare debacle rolls on — looking even worse than it did a week ago, if that’s possible — there’s a separate but related issue involving Medicaid expansion. As with Obamacare, people who oppose the expansion risk being called heartless murderers for “denying sick people care.”

The thing is, though, there’s a difference between care and coverage. Insurance programs, whether Obamacare or Medicaid, only provide coverage. It’s doctors who provide care. But because government insurance programs — even money- sucking ones like Medicaid, which costs $ 450 billion a year — can’t pay doctors enough and smother them with paperwork, doctors are hard to find. Without doctors, coverage doesn’t mean much.

Extensive research indicates that Medicaid recipients do worse than people without any insurance. A study found that Medicaid patients hospitalized for major surgery were 13% more likely to die in the hospital than those without insurance.

It’s not surprising that a government that can’t build a working insurance website can’t run a massive insurance program so that its beneficiaries actually benefit. What’s surprising is that there’s been little push back over the results that Medicaid has yielded. It’s as if the government “health care” boosters didn’t care about the well- being of the poor.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds Law professor University of Tennessee