The result noted by Ezra Klein in his column is actually pretty well known in the literature. If Obamacare survives the court challenges, I think there will be a lot of surprise among non-specialists when it turns out not to affect health outcomes very much. Behavior, such as eating, exercising, smoking, sleeping and stress, along with public health measures related to things like clean water and safe food, actually matter a lot more.
Thank you for this post. I'm not a health economist but I remember the qualitative conclusions of the RAND HIE papers and I wasn't sure if I was crazy for wondering why people have spent so much time and energy fighting over health care reform. Like, someone must have told the president about those results at some point, right?
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