The Washington Post reports that Obamacare has probably made people healthier:
It is difficult to prove conclusively that the law has made a difference in people’s health, but some strong evidence has emerged in the past few years. Compared with similar people who have stable coverage through their jobs, previously uninsured people who bought ACA health plans with federal subsidies had a big jump in detection of high blood pressure and in the number of prescriptions they had filled, according to a 2018 study in the journal Health Affairs.
And after the law allowed young adults to stay longer on their parents’ insurance policies, fewer 19- to 25-year-olds with asthma failed to see a doctor because it cost too much, according to an analysis of survey results published earlier this year by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There’s more along these lines, and it’s nice to see it highlighted. At the same time, there’s something weirdly pointless about all these studies. I mean, we all know what Obamacare did: it gave lots of people access to decent health care that they didn’t have before. And either you believe that access to decent health care is good for your health or you don’t. If you do, then Obamacare has to have worked almost by definition. If you don’t, then we should dismantle the entire health care industry and spend our money on something else.
We all know the answer to this question, and we’ve proved it by putting our money where our mouths are: we believe, strongly and unequivocally, that access to decent health care is an enormous benefit. Given that, it’s not really possible to believe that providing access to decent health care for the poor is anything but good for them. Right?
