ObamaCare’s Priceless Warm Glow

Ed Kilgore says ObamaCare opponents don’t care about cost‐​benefit analyses:

many of them just can’t bring themselves to even notice that…Obamacare with its Medicaid expansion, health care exchanges, and regulatory mandates [does] actually provide health coverage to people in exchange for the money and the “liberty” surrendered.

Speaking of, what is the exchange rate between liberty and “liberty”?


But about those benefits. What benefits do broad‐​based expansions of health insurance, like ObamaCare, actually provide? Aside from giving Kilgore a warm glow, that is.


It turns out there has been only one—one!—scientifically rigorous study of that question. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment found Medicaid coverage confers modest improvements in self‐​reported health and financial security. The first batch of that study’s results appeared more than a year after Congress enacted ObamaCare. And there remains to this day absolutely zero evidence that Medicaid or other broad‐​based expansions of health insurance buy us the most health and financial security per dollar spent.


Then again, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment did not attempt to measure the value of the warm glow that Kilgore and others derive from Medicaid and ObamaCare, one that appears to be worth trillions of dollars of other people’s money.