Does having health insurance actually save lives or improve health more than being uninsured? This question has not been answered until very recently.

In 2008, Oregon lawmakers decided they had enough additional public money to add 10,000 people to the state’s Medicaid program. So Oregon officials held a lottery that ultimately signed up 6,400 new Medicaid enrollees. A further 5,800 people were eligible for the program, but were not selected. People in this group had the same health and economic profile as the lottery winners. This created the perfect test case on the effectiveness of Medicaid in providing care. These 5,800 people became the control group in an objective, randomized study.

The two-year results of the health comparison study were published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine. The conclusion is surprising. It turns out that having Medicaid health insurance does not improve health outcomes nor does it improve mortality statistics, compared to having no insurance coverage at all. The Medicaid group had no improvement in the important objective measurements of blood sugar levels, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. The study did find that vaguely defined “mental health” did improve, however this was done via subjective telephone interviews, not objective clinical data. For those few people requiring prolonged medical and hospital treatment, having Medicaid did improve their financial status because their medical bills were covered by federal and Oregon taxpayers.

The existing Medicaid program has 60 million enrollees nationally at a cost of $430 billion per year. Looking forward, the cost is estimated to increase to $900 billion per year by 2019.

Medicaid is an extremely inefficient program and reimbursement for doctors and other providers is about half of what private insurance pays for the same services. Doctors are not able to pay their own overhead with these low payment rates and consequently our existing Medicaid patients have trouble accessing health care.

The Washington State Medical Association did a recent survey of primary care providers. Results showed 18 percent had dropped all Medicaid patients and 24 percent were not taking new Medicaid patients because of poor payment and the complexities of Medicaid cases compared to those of privately insured patients. Getting access to health care is a significant problem for people in the existing Medicaid program in our state. It turns out having insurance on paper is not the same as actually getting health care.

The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, gives states the option to expand Medicaid to at least 16 million new patients nationally and 280,000 in Washington state. The law says that any adult over the age of 18 who earns less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level will be eligible for Medicaid. The estimated cost to taxpayers of this expansion is at least $450 billion over the first 10 years starting in 2014.

The Oregon study confirms that Medicaid does not provide better health care to people than having no health insurance at all. These terrible results not only come with a huge taxpayer cost, but also trap poor individuals in a virtually worthless health insurance plan.

The Washington State Legislature is considering expanding Medicaid in the current state budget negotiations. The federal government is bribing the states with federal taxpayer money to expand Medicaid. Many of our state lawmakers support the expansion because it feels like “free” federal money and because they reason Medicaid is better than no health insurance at all. The large, randomized Oregon study shows this is not true.

Of course, state taxpayers are also federal taxpayers, so ultimately the people of Washington state will pay for this Medicaid expansion. Medicaid is a pay-as-you-go program. The idea of leaving free federal money on the table makes no sense. If Medicaid doesn’t expand, the burden of taxes should be reduced for everyone.

Medical outcomes for people in the Medicaid program are no better than outcomes for people without health insurance. This fact makes it very difficult to argue that Medicaid is better than no insurance, especially considering the tremendous cost involved.

Our legislators would do better to improve the existing Medicaid program, eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, improve access, and make the program a real safety-net health insurance plan that provides quality care at a reasonable cost.