This is Scott Gottlieb, writing in The Wall Street Journal:
- A 2010 study…published in the medical journal Cancer, found that Medicaid patients and people lacking any health insurance were both 50% more likely to die when compared with privately insured patients.
- A 2010 study…published in the Annals of Surgery, found that being on Medicaid was associated with the longest length of stay, the most total hospital costs, and the highest risk of death.
- A 2011 study…published in the American Journal of Cardiology, found that…Medicaid patients were…more than twice as likely to have a major, subsequent heart attack after angioplasty as were patients who didn’t have any health insurance at all…
- A 2011 study of…patients undergoing lung transplants for pulmonary diseases, published in the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation, found that Medicaid patients were 8.1% less likely to survive 10 years after the surgery than their privately insured and uninsured counterparts.
In all of these studies, the researchers controlled for the socioeconomic and cultural factors that can negatively influence the health of poorer patients on Medicaid.
