As Peter Suderman notes in his piece at Hit and Run, this is huge. It knocks the chocks from underneath one of Obamacare's major justifications; we need to expand Medicaid so that the poor can live healthier lives. But a study just out in the New England Journal of Medicine disputes that notion: This is huge, and stunning, even for critics of Medicaid: A randomized-controlled study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by a group of nation's top health policy scholars has found that Medicaid has no measurable effect on any of the objectively measured physical health outcomes the study examined. In its second-year results, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which randomly assigned Medicaid to 10,000 people in Oregon, and compared them with a randomly selected control group, found that those who got Medicaid did not on average have healthier blood pressure, cholesterol levels, or diabetic blood pressure control than those who did not get Medicaid. Those with Medicaid...(Read Full Post)