C'mon, Jeb!—this is like shooting fish in a barrel. Here's some classic Jebby
from today:
"It turns out that being on Medicaid isn't necessarily a better deal than being uninsured. For those policy wonks in the crowd, you may want to check the Oregon study that analyzed like-kind patients, like-kind people, that had insurance and those that were receiving Medicaid and what they found is: the people who didn't have insurance actually got better quality care."
Beyond the fact that Jeb! messed up the delivery of this priceless nugget of information (he meant that it compared the
uninsured to Medicaid recipients), he also flat-out lied about the outcome of the study. Fortunately for us, our own Joan McCarter already
thoroughly debunked the conservative myth of what this study showed two years ago.
1. The study never said the uninsured got "better quality care"
Here's what it actually concluded:
This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.
"No significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes" and those measured outcomes were: "blood-pressure, cholesterol, and glycated hemoglobin levels." So based on similar outcomes from those three categories, Jeb! is claiming that the uninsured received better care.
2. The second half of that sentence matters
Anyone who thinks that increasing access to care and reducing rates of depression and financial strain doesn't matter, ought to have their head checked. When's the last time you thought, "I better buy health insurance in order to control my cholesterol levels?" For most us, zip. Instead we think, I better have this just in case something really bad happens and, in the meantime, I'll have the peace of mind of going for regular checkups and knowing that I can afford treatment if something comes up.
Put more elegantly by TIME:
Insurance is about health, but it’s also about money. A major value of comprehensive health insurance is that it protects people from financial ruin if they have a horrible health emergency or an expensive long-term condition that requires treatment. A homeowner living near a river doesn’t buy flood insurance to prevent floods or protect his home if a flood occurs. He buys flood insurance so that if his house is destroyed, he will be able to recover financially. This too is a major purpose of health insurance. The latest results from Oregon showed that being on Medicaid “nearly eliminated catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenditures.” This matters and may be part of the reason earlier results from the ongoing Oregon study indicated that those on Medicaid were happier.
3. Can we please suspend the notion that Jeb! is a "policy wonk" or even knows what one is?
Jeb! not only misrepresented the study's findings as showing "better quality care," even if he had accurately cherry-picked the information and suggested that there were "no significant improvements," he would have been wrong. There were, in fact, "significant improvements" in diabetes detection and rates of depression, not to mention, financial well-being.
Jeb isn't a policy wonk—he can't even get his misinformation right.