A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine looks at Oregon's Medicaid expansion and finds that there's clear improvement in recipients' lives in only some areas. Now, how did the first opinion-shapers who read this study react to it?
Well, right-wing opinion-shapers got to the study first, and they did what they usually do: they went nuclear. The Cato Institute essentially declared Medicaid expansion, and thus Obamacare, utterly and incontrovertibly worthless:
Today, the nation's top health economists released a study that throws a huge "STOP" sign in front of ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion.Others on the right were equally unnuanced in their response to this study:
The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, or OHIE, may be the most important study ever conducted on health insurance.
... the OHIE's second-year results found no evidence that Medicaid improves the physical health of enrollees. There were some modest improvements in depression and financial strain -- but it is likely those gains could be achieved at a much lower cost than through an extremely expensive program like Medicaid....
* Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post: "Spending on Medicaid Doesn't Actually Help the Poor."
*James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, at Business Insider: "Bombshell New Study Shows That Expanding Medicaid Does Nothing To Improve People's Health"
*Philip Klein at The Washington Examiner: "Landmark Study Shatters Liberal Health Care Claims"
Now, right-wingers say that the right-wing information machine -- Fox, talk radio, right-wing think tanks, right-wing blogs -- is a necessary corrective to the "liberal media," i.e., what most people think of as the mainstream media. So that means the mainstream media was just as unnuanced in its trumpeting of the successes shown in this study as the right-wing opinion machine was in trumpeting the failures ... right?
Er, no. Megan McArdle rounds up the initial mainstream responses:
"Study: Medicaid reduces financial hardship, doesn’t quickly improve physical health" says the Washington Post.It's only now, after right-wing propagandists have set the terms of the debate, that there's some pushback from liberals. And even some of that is nuanced. At The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn touts the positive results shown in the study, and says of conservative critics, "Did they read read the same study that I did?" -- but the title-bar headline for his piece is "Medicaid Expansion: Oregon Study Shows Benefits, Mostly." Kevin Drum writes a gosh-I'm-not-sure-what-to-think post titled "So Is Healthcare Worthwhile or Not?," then gets around to reading the study and boldly proclaims, "Followup: Medicaid Probably Does Improve Health Outcomes After All." Mostly! Probably!
The Associated Press headline reads "Study: Depression rates for uninsured dropped with Medicaid coverage"
At the New York Times, it's "Study Finds Expanded Medicaid Increases Health Care Use"
I think Slate is closer to the mark, though a bit, well, Slate-ish: "Bad News for Obamacare: A new study suggests universal health care makes people happier but not healthier."
Look, I think the liberals in this debate are being more honest. But that's the problem. Our side is dominated by honest brokers -- people who'd read this and lean toward the argument that the government-intervention glass is half full, or maybe a fair amount more than half full, but never that it's completely full.
The problem is, they're up against a right-wing information machine that's ready to shout to the world that not only is the glass half empty, but it's shattered, and pieces of broken glass are being nibbled on by your babies, while other shards are cutting a hole in your wallet pocket.
The right wins all the time because the right thinks the whole point of political debate is winning. Right-wingers instantly pounce on everything that might give them a win. They exploit everything that might give them a win in a way that maximizes the chance of a win. And they all instinctively know how to flood the zone whenever one of them finds anything exploitable.
Intellectual honesty and nuance can't compete with that.
