Dreadful truth: Medicaid = poor health outcomes for kids

Government health coverage for everyone?  Not so fast...

Via Forbes:

There is a small cohort of left-of-center health policy analysts who remain in denial about the poor health outcomes caused by Medicaid. And understandably: the principal rationale for Obamacare was its expansion of insurance coverage, half of which comes from a reckless enlargement of Medicaid. If patients on Medicaid fare worse than those who aren’t, then spending $100 billion a year to expand the program is a disastrous choice.

Back in March, I wrote about the Health Tracking Study Physician Survey, which showed that internists are 8.5 times as likely to reject all Medicaid patients, as compared to those with private insurance. In this week’s New England Journal of Medicinecomes a new study in which individuals, posing as mothers of children with common medical conditions requiring specialty care, called outpatient clinics asking for doctors’ appointments. Those representing themselves as having Medicaid or State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) insurance were denied an appointment 66 percent of the time, compared to only 11 percent of those saying they had private insurance: a ratio of 6 to 1...

In addition, the authors reported, those clinics that accepted both Medicaid/S-CHIP and privately-insured children, the average wait time for an appointment was, on average, 22 days longer for those on Medicaid/S-CHIP: 42 days versus 20.

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