This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 3rd, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

New results from the Oregon Medicaid study indicate that the billions of dollars spent on Medicaid

do not necessarily improve health outcomes for

the poorest of the poor.

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute says besides challenging

the core arguments on behalf of Obamacare,

just what do we get for all of those Medicaid dollars?

What this study did was it measured certain outcomes

to see what Medicaid was buying us for the trillions of dollars that we spend on it.

With regard to physical health outcomes,

it found no evidence that Medicaid improved the physical outcomes the physical health outcomes that it measured.

Those were control of hypertension, control of diabetes, blood sugar, cholesterol levels.

When researchers looked at the people who did not

get the Medicaid coverage and the people who did win the lottery

to get the Medicaid coverage, they could find no difference in these objective outcomes criteria or objective clinical outcomes and that raises the question, wait a second, what are we

getting for all this money that we're spending on Medicaid? One of the main rationales for Medicaid and Obamacare is that if you give people health insurance,

they'll get more preventive care, that'll improve their health.

That will reduce health care spending.

But that's not what's happening here. These people, in some

instances getting the Medicaid coverage did not improve their access to the

preventive services for for these ailments.

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