BREAKING! Access to health care improves health outcomes

Amazingly enough, getting health treatment improves health outcomes:

Poor people in Michigan with asthma and diabetes were admitted to hospitals less often after they joined Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. More than 25,000 Ohio smokers got help through the state’s Medicaid expansion that led them to quit. And around the country, patients with advanced kidney disease who went on dialysis were more likely to be alive a year later if they lived in a Medicaid-expansion state.

Such findings are part of an emerging mosaic of evidence that, nearly a decade after it became one of the most polarizing health-care laws in U.S. history, the ACA is making some Americans healthier — and less likely to die.

The evidence is accumulating just as the ACA’s future is, once again, being cast into doubt. The most immediate threat arises from a federal lawsuit, brought by a group of Republican state attorneys general, that challenges the law’s constitutionality. A trial court judge in Texas ruled late last year that the entire law is invalid, and an opinion on the case is expected at any time from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The case could well put the ACA before the Supreme Court for a third time.

This may seem like “studies report that water is wet,” except for the cadre of know-nothing libertarian hacks determined to deny the obvious, and whose mission to take health coverage away from as many people as possible may yet succeed.