Excerpt from: Politifact (click for full article)
The new study in the New England Journal of Medicine was published almost a month after our fact-check ran, and unlike the studies we evaluated initially, it was specifically designed to compare health outcomes for Medicaid patients against those who are uninsured.
Did the new study improve Cruz’s case?
We should note that we evaluate claims based only on evidence known at the time. We don’t go back and re-evaluate if new facts come to light later, because it doesn’t make sense to give people credit for evidence they couldn’t possibly have known about at the time.
In this case, though, we were curious about whether this study changed the debate on this important issue going forward. So we decided to take a fresh look.
The new paper represents the second phase of a study coauthored by Katherine Baicker of Harvard University and Amy N. Finkelstein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2008, Oregon expanded its Medicaid rolls, but only had enough funding to cover a portion of residents who wanted to sign up. To distribute spots in the program, officials set up a lottery.
The researchers compared 6,387 lottery winners to 5,842 who didn’t get a slot, tracking factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, depression, and out-of-pocket medical spending.
The study produced mixed results. That has led both critics and advocates of expanding Medicaid to rush to portray the study’s results as evidence for their side. Supporters of expanding Medicaid are pointing to the findings that beneficiaries had less depression and more financial security. Catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenditures, for example, were "nearly eliminated."
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