This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 15, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As we await a Supreme Court opinion in the case of King v Burwell,

a new study based on the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, is calling into question

the benefits of Medicaid expansion, both to those who use Medicaid and to taxpayers.

The Cato Institute's Director of Health Policy Studies Michael Cannon explains.

The Medicaid program, by one measure, is the largest health insurance program in the world.

It enrolls more people than Medicare, which is the federal government's program for the elderly. in the United States. It spends about

540 billion dollars per year and that's going to rise dramatically in coming years. That's more than the entire economy of Switzerland or Belgium or or other European countries.

But there is very little data on the benefits that we get from spending all that money on this program

providing health care to the poor. And so what a number of economists did a few

years ago was they looked at a natural experiment.

The state of Oregon randomly assigned some people to receive Medicaid coverage

and other people not to receive Medicaid coverage.

This population is very similar to the population that is supposed to be covered by the Affordable Care

Act Medicaid expansion or Obama Care's Medicaid expansion. And what these

economists found was it provided some measure of financial protection from the cost of medical

care.

There was a decline in mental illness or an increase in mental health among people who won the lottery

and got Medicaid coverage, although the reason

for that is questionable.

We're not really sure why that is.

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