The Cruel, Heartless Expansion Of Medicaid Under Obamacare
/You have undoubtedly noticed that the official Democratic talking point about any and all efforts to repeal or even modify Obamacare is that this is "cruel." OK, sometimes it's "heartless." Or maybe "a human tragedy." You are taking away "healthcare" from the people and leaving them to suffer in the streets! People will die!!!!
Just to warm you up for this post, here is a small roundup:
- Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), commenting on the Graham-Cassidy bill on September 20: "We are on the precipice of one of the most cruel and outrageous legislative acts in recent history."
- Washington Post, July 20, commenting on the then-current Republican "repeal only" plan: "CBO again confirms the cruelty of GOP’s ‘repeal-only’ plan."
- The New Republic, March 14, commenting on another earlier version of Obamacare repeal/replace known as the American Health Care Act: "[T]he incredible cruelty of the Republican legislation didn’t become clear until Monday, when the Congressional Budget Office . . . estimated it would undo nearly all of the coverage gains we’ve seen under the Affordable Care Act, creating human tragedy on a scale far greater than even pessimistic analysts imagined.
- New York Magazine, September 5: "[Trump's position on immigration] contains the same mix of cruelty and desperate incompetence as his position on repealing Obamacare."
Etc., etc., etc., etc. I mean, isn't it completely obvious that people who have "healthcare" are going to have superior health outcomes to those who don't?
Well, some things that seem like they obviously must be true turn out not to be true at all. I have linked many times to the famous randomized study from Oregon published in the NEJM in 2013 that spectacularly failed to demonstrate any health gains from putting people on Medicaid. Then in a post from March of this year, I went through the then-just-published neighborhood-by-neighborhood health data for New York City for 2015 to examine whether those neighborhoods with very high Medicaid participation rates had better or worse health outcomes than the other neighborhoods in the City. Uniformly and without exception, the high-Medicaid-participation neighborhoods had worse health outcomes, and by large amounts, and on every metric considered.
And finally, in a post in August of this year, I noted that the full implementation of Obamacare in 2015 and 2016, instead of being accompanied by an increase in life expectancy, had been accompanied by a decrease in life expectancy. How could that have happened? I asked:
Could it be because expanded Medicaid is paying for opioids for the vulnerable? That's a very reasonable hypothesis, although there are not yet enough data to prove it.
It's only been a little more than a month since that post, but some data are starting to trickle in. And sure enough, those data strongly suggest that large numbers of new Obamacare Medicaid recipients are using their "healthcare" to obtain and use (or maybe sell) opioid painkillers, with very bad follow-on health effects. An op-ed by Allysia Finley in Monday's Wall Street Journal, "Does Medicaid Spur Opioid Abuse?", collects some facts and figures, which were originally put together by CDC at the request of Senator Ron Johnson (who lost a nephew to a heroin overdose). Some particularly dramatic examples:
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that overdose deaths per capita rose twice as much on average between 2013 and 2015 in states that expanded Medicaid than those that didn’t—for example, 205% in North Dakota, which expanded Medicaid, vs. 18% in South Dakota, which didn’t. . . . Between 2010 and 2013, overdose deaths rose by 28% in Ohio and 36% in Wisconsin. Between 2013 and 2015, they climbed 39% in Ohio, which expanded Medicaid, but only 2% in Wisconsin, which did not.
I wouldn't call it definitive proof yet, but all data I have seen so far indicate that a big use of expanded Medicaid has been to obtain prescription painkillers. Some -- indeed, many -- of those prescriptions will inevitably be abused.
Of course there has been some push back. Here is an example from the AP, August 31, "Medicaid fueling opioid epidemic? New theory is challenged.":
[U]niversity researchers say Medicaid seems to be doing the opposite of what conservatives allege. “Medicaid is doing its job” by increasing treatment for opioid addiction, said Temple University economist Catherine Maclean, who recently published a paper on Medicaid expansion and drug treatment. “As more time passes, we may see a decline in overdoses in expansion states relative to nonexpansion states.”
Seems like Ms. Maclean has no data to support her position, but speculates with great confidence that the government program will end up having a positive effect since, I guess, all government programs must inevitably have positive effects because their proponents are such great experts and such good people and so well-meaning. Right!
Or there's the theory that people do much better in life striving to make it on their own than they do by accepting government handouts. Anyway, if deaths keep going up more in the Medicaid expansion states than the others, then which one is "cruel" -- Medicaid expansion or not?