Unsurprisingly, Medicaid helps people.

Some conservatives have long argued that Medicaid doesn’t actually help people—that private charity is sufficient and, anyway, most doctors don’t accept Medicaid. Many others, of course, argue that privacy charity is far from sufficient, and people fare much worse without health insurance. Oregon accidentally provided the first test of this with a control group, for lack of enough funding to cover all applicants, resulting in the first meaningful study, conducted by Harvard. That found that, by an enormous margin, those Oregonians who received Medicare coverage fare overwhelmingly better than those who did not. In all regards, the lives of those folks on Medicare are vastly better than those who are not. At last, the question is settled. →