According to the website, the Oregon Health Study “is the first randomized controlled experiment to examine the causal effects of having some type of insurance coverage versus having no insurance at all.” The findings, released a few days ago, have unleashed a storm of commentary on what the investigators did and did not find in terms of links between coverage and health outcomes. Writing over at The Incidental Economist, Harold Pollack quotes Joseph Newhouse for the notion that the “Oregon Medicaid experiment ‘is a Rorschach test of people’s views on the ACA.’” After the jump, I am going to try to defend that claim, although likely not in the way that good readers of Bill of Health might expect.
So here’s the funny thing: even though I am an attorney, an historian, and a bioethicist who researches health inequalities, stigma, and social justice, I actually am less of an expert on the delivery of health care services than virtually every blogger here, and likely a goodly portion of the readership, too. When interviewing for a job as a prawf some years ago, I was asked for my opinion on the fate of the ACA (then still in Congress), and I had to shrug and say that I really was not up to date on all of the provisions of the bill nor of its likely passage, nor of its potential impact. (No, I did not get the job!).
This is not because of anti-intellectualism, I believe (and hope!). This is rather because of my engagement with the overwhelming evidence that access to health care services is simply not a prime determinant of health and its distribution in human populations. In a seminal 2007 essay in Health Affairs, Paula Lantz, Richard Lichtenstein, and the good Dr. Pollack himself note that “Lack of access to health care is not the fundamental cause of health vulnerability or social disparities in health” (p. 1256).* The authors go on to warn of the limits of medicalizing health policy, and suggest that if we want to use laws and policies to improve overall population health and compress health inequities, we need to go way beyond simply expanding access to basic health care services.
Read More