Data Points And Dogma

Ed Kilgore | Washington Monthly | May 2, 2013

By now, if you read MSM or conservative web sites, you’ve probably heard that a new randomized study of Medicaid in Oregon (published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine) shows the program has no impact on the health of people receiving it, which, some say, means the program is a worthless waste of money, or that its expansion via Obamacare should be resisted.

Kevin Drum, who has been following this development closely, reports the results rather differently:

In a nutshell, Oregon held a lottery a few years ago in which some people received Medicaid coverage and others didn’t. Today’s study is a two-year followup, and the headline result is that “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes.” But it turns out that “significant” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and the headline is extremely misleading.