Despite the rhetoric and generous Obamacare subsidy, there is a new and damning report out this week that the Medicaid program doesn’t make people healthier among a series of benchmarks.
“Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.”
“It’s disappointing,” Zeke Emanuel, a former Obama health policy adviser, told The Washington Post.
[T]he Medicaid expansion is, in the words of the Center for American Progress, “a centerpiece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” And it doesn’t appear to make people healthier in the way proponents had hoped.
The problems with Medicaid following passage of the PPACA have increased dramatically. The Supreme Court said the Medicaid provisions were unconstitutional and since then more than half of the states have rejected the PPACA-Medicaid expansion.
Most importantly, the financing mechanism of the PPACA has become very tenuous. The Medicaid provision alone represents $1 Trillion, or half, of the overall cost and financing of the Obamacare law.
-Bruce