Repealing it would reverse those incentives and could increase the output of goods and services, the gross domestic product, by seven-tenths of 1 percent, the study said.
The law tends to “reduce the supply of labor by reducing some people’s incentives to work,” the report said. But after taking account of the positive economic effects of a repeal, it said, the increase in the deficit would be $137 billion. The budget office said that repealing the law - with its insurance subsidies and expanded eligibility for Medicaid - would increase federal budget deficits by $353 billion in the coming decade, largely because the government would forgo big savings in Medicare and would lose revenue from new taxes and fees. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the report showed that “repealing the president’s health care law will increase economic growth.” But Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said it showed that “repeal will explode the deficit.” Republicans can use it to argue that the law itself is bad. Democrats, defending the law they passed five years ago, can use the report to argue that repealing the law would be a bad move because it would increase the deficit. That increased their medical spending by about 35 percent, compared to adults who did not win Medicaid coverage in the lottery.The report by the budget office is sure to be cited by members of both parties as they continue fighting over health care through the 2016 elections. “There are some positive effects on health,” he said, calling the effect on depression “especially strong.”Ĭonfirming previous findings released by the researchers, the new round of results found that adults covered by Medicaid increased their use of a broad number of health services, like mammograms and cholesterol tests. “The authors are almost tilting the spin on the story to be a little more pessimistic than I would have been,” said John Holahan of the Urban Institute, responding to the new findings.
Getting Medicaid coverage reduced the probability of a positive screening by more than 30 percent. Where Medicaid seemed to have the strongest measured impact was on depression. It significantly increased the probability that a person would receive a diagnosis of diabetes and be treated, though it did not reduce blood sugar levels noticeably. The researchers found that Medicaid coverage did not significantly affect the prevalence or diagnosis of hypertension or high cholesterol, or the use of drugs used to treat those conditions. It did, however, substantially reduce the incidence of depression, and it made them vastly more financially secure.
But the study suggests that Medicaid coverage did not make those adults much healthier, at least within the two-year time frame of the research, judging by their blood pressure, blood sugar and other measures. It found that those who gained Medicaid coverage spent more on health care, making more visits to doctors and trips to the hospital. The study, called the Oregon Health Study, compares thousands of low-income people in Oregon who received access to Medicaid with an identical population that did not. New results from a landmark study, released on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, go a long way toward answering those questions. How will that change their finances, spending habits, use of available medical services and - most important - their health?
WASHINGTON - Come January, millions of low-income adults will gain health insurance coverage through Medicaid in one of the farthest-reaching provisions of the Obama health care law.