We Don't Know Whether Obamacare Was a Net Gain

Last week was a wild adventure on the health-care front, as the House seemed to inch closer to passing a bill that repealed or altered significant chunks of Obamacare, before shying away at the last minute. With Democrats proudly declaring that they saved millions of Americans from the brink of disaster, it seems an appropriate time to consider the latest assessment of what Obamacare has actually done for those people.

There's a new paper out looking at how the Affordable Care Act has transformed health-care access, and in turn, what that has done for health. The authors' first answer probably won’t surprise you: when millions more people became insured, more got checkups and primary care doctors. But it’s not obvious that these people got any healthier. As the paper puts it: “No statistically significant effects on risky behaviors or self-assessed health emerge for the full sample.”