◼ Does having health insurance make people healthier? It's widely assumed that it does. - Michael Barone/Townhall
Obamacare advocates repeatedly said that its expansion of Medicaid would save thousands of lives a year. Obamacare critics seldom challenged the idea that increased insurance coverage would improve at least some people's health.
Now, out of Oregon, comes a study that casts doubt on the premise that insurance improves health....
Most U.S. health insurance today, thanks to the tax preference for employer-provided insurance, is not real insurance at all.
Real insurance pays for rare, expensive and unwelcome events, like your house burning down. It doesn't make sense to insure for routine expenses, like repainting your living room.
The Oregon Health Study suggests that insurance isn't necessary for people to get what are now, for people of a certain age, routine measures like blood pressure medicine. Maybe government should help poor people pay for them, but they manage to get them nevertheless.
Americans have come to expect health insurance to pay for routine treatments. Obamacare reinforces that in its requirements for coverage and makes it more difficult for many to insure against catastrophic health care expenses.
That's not likely to make people healthier.
