Does Health Coverage Make People Healthier?

http://www.slate.com/id/2298463/

The passage of last year's Affordable Care Act promised to bring health coverage to all Americans, including the country's poorest and least likely to be covered under the current system: Among the act's many provisions was a guarantee of Medicaid coverage for uninsured low-income adults.
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As with many aspects of the ACA, the effect of insuring millions of poor Americans represents a leap into the unknown. How much more health care would they use, at what cost, and to what benefit? Would Medicaid actually produce healthier, more able-bodied Americans? Or simply increase health care use with no discernable payoff? Would it even increase medical access at all?

A landmark study released this morning on a major health policy experiment in Oregon provides some hint at what the answer to these questions might be if the ACA becomes a reality. A consortium of researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the state of Oregon has studied the impact of randomly assigning Medicaid insurance to poor Oregonians in 2008 as part of an expansion of the state's health coverage. They found that Medicaid's impact on health, happiness, and general well-being is enormous, and delivered at relatively low cost: Low-income Oregonians whose names were selected by lottery to apply for Medicaid availed themselves of more treatment and preventive care than those who remained excluded from government health insurance. After a year with insurance, the Medicaid lottery winners were happier, healthier, and under less financial strain.

Most health flows from public health (addressing the community) and from lifestyle. But when even with the healthiest of communities and the healthiest of lifestyles, when health disasters hit, access is needed to healthcare.

The study didn't look at health. It looked at self-reported use and access and whether they felt healthier (more or less).

The next part is actually examining whether it made them literally healthier. Doesn't stop the editors from equating access and feelings of well-being with "health." Most of them are sufficiently well insuranced and medicated to assume that the only kind of health problem people *seriously* have are anxiety and insecurity over money.