This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 12, 2011. I'm Kila Brown.

A new study of Medicaid recipients in Oregon is shedding new light on the prospects for

Obamacare.

The lessons many are taking from that study are the wrong ones.

So says Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

Some of the nation's top health economists just released the most important health insurance study in the last 30 years.

Supporters of Obamacare are calling this vindication of

Obamacare and its expansion of Medicaid and health insurance to 32 million

Americans.

But it's not a vindication of Obamacare at all.

The devil's in the details here, obviously.

What was the nature of this study?

How did it come about for decades scholars and others

have debated the benefits of expanding health insurance to more Americans

particularly government provided health insurance like the Medicaid

program for the poor.

There's been a lot of debate because there hasn't been a lot of good evidence.

To get good evidence about whether Medicaid improves health outcomes, whether it makes people more financially

secure, you would have to randomly assign some people to get Medicaid and randomly assign some people

not to get Medicaid, and a lot of people think that would be unethical.

But what happened in Oregon in 2008 was

Oregon had decided it had enough money to enroll another 10,000 people in its Medicaid program

...