Medicaid's awful results-Death By Government

Professor Glenn Reynolds reports on the rather bad results of Medicaid:

extensive research indicates that Medicaid recipients actually do worse than people without any insurance at all. A University of Virginia study found that Medicaid patients hospitalized for major surgery were actually 13% more likely to die in the hospital than those without any health insurance. Likewise, the National Cancer Institute found that late-stage prostate cancer, late-stage breast cancer, and late-stage melanoma were actually much more common in Medicaid recipients than in the uninsured. And a Johns Hopkins study of patients receiving lung transplants found that Medicaid patients were 29% more likely to die within three years.

What's more, a University of Pennsylvania study (published in the journal Cancer) found that colon cancer patients with Medicaid had a higher mortality rate than uninsured patients, and a higher rate of surgical complications. And these findings hold up even when you correct for age and socioeconomic status.

Why Medicaid recipients do worse isn't entirely clear, but it's likely because the best doctors seldom accept Medicaid, leaving patients with subpar physicians

Death by government.