Our Health Policy Matters

Now that 2014 and Obamacare are both here, there will be plenty of stories about Affordable Care Act implementation.  Some will be newsworthy; but others will just be history.  Last week, we got our first history story characterized as exploding news. The Washington Post reported on a newly-released Harvard study that analyzed the impact of the 2008 Oregon Medicaid expansion on hospital emergency department visits.  The study found that there was a 40 percent increase in the number of emergency department visits made by the new Medicaid enrollees. For the Post article, an MIT health economist (I guess no Harvard ones were available!) commented  that he viewed it “as part of a broader set of evidence that covering people with health insurance doesn’t save money,” something he went on to characterize as a “misleading motivator for the Affordable Care Act.” And Forbes went farther, claiming the study results are “ undermining [the] central rationale...

Now that 2014 and Obamacare are both here, there will be plenty of stories about Affordable Care Act implementation.  Some will be newsworthy; but others will just be history.  Last week, we got our first history story characterized as exploding news. The Washington Post reported on a newly-released Harvard study that analyzed the impact of the 2008 Oregon Medicaid expansion on hospital emergency department visits.  The study found that there was a 40 percent increase in the number of emergency department visits made by the new Medicaid enrollees. For the Post article, an MIT health economist (I guess no Harvard ones were available!) commented  that he viewed it “as part of a broader set of evidence that covering people with health insurance doesn’t save money,” something he went on to characterize as a “misleading motivator for the Affordable Care Act.” And Forbes went farther, claiming the study results are “ undermining [the] central rationale...