A growing body of evidence suggests that policies to improve maternal and child health may have broad societal benefits. That could mean “existing benefit-cost calculations underestimate the true value of government investment in children’s health,” the study’s authors write.
Medicaid was created in 1965 to provide safety-net health-care coverage for poor families on welfare. Today, it insures 72 million people, including 28 million children, and has expanded coverage beyond those eligible for welfare to many other people with low incomes. The federal government and states collectively spent $545 billion on the program in 2015, but it has recently been targeted for funding cuts in various Republican-backed bills intended to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.
Critics sometimes question whether Medicaid improves people’s health. A famous 2013 study in Oregon found that people who were randomly selected to get health coverage didn’t experience measurable improvements in physical health over two years, although having Medicaid did reduce their rates of depression and their financial burdens.
But, at least for children whom the program reaches in utero, the benefits of Medicaid coverage may be long-lasting—and difficult to measure. Many of the mothers who got expanded prenatal care might have been fine without it, but for a small number it made a big difference, Miller said. “It seems like it is having a very strong impact on a relatively small group of women that are really at risk,” she said. “For the group of women that really needed the care, the effect is potentially very large."
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.