May 2, 2025
The human cost of cutting Medicaid
Helen Levy & Tom Buchmueller (Stephen M. Ross School of Business & visiting scholar at The Brookings Institution) discuss the impact cuts to Medicaid will have on Americans’ health and mortality,
“Medicaid coverage improves children’s health at birth, and coverage in childhood and adolescence leads to better health and economic outcomes later in life. Furthermore, women covered by Medicaid as infants have better birth outcomes when they become mothers…(T)he evidence is now clear: Medicaid improves health. Cutting it will cost lives. Those are facts.”
Levy & Buchmueller’s Annual Reviews article finds, unlike their previous cautious finding that health insurance improves health, studies using different data sources and research designs provide credible evidence that health insurance coverage reduces mortality.