Texas Democrat Al Green of Houston got the most attention of his lengthy congressional career by shaking up the State of the Union to call attention to proposed cuts to Medicaid.
He was censured by Congress, but now people are talking about this health program.
In an earlier article about Medicaid, I compared the health of people in states that expanded it with those that chose not to, focusing on how many state residents report having only fair to poor health, broken down by how women and men responded in surveys. In this article, I report those results that compare across states.
In a 2023 ranking, the CDC ranked all of the states. “To determine the healthiest states, we assessed all 50 states in the US based on 12 different criteria and assigned a score out of 100 for each criterion. These individual scores were then combined and weighted to obtain a final score of 100. The data for these key indicators were collected from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”
The CDC measure states “The indicators include… Air Quality, Obesity Percentage, Adults with No Physical Leisure-time Activity, Prevalence of Sleeping Less Than 7 Hours Among Adults, Current Smoking Rates for Adults, Percentage of Binge Drinkers Among Adults, Percent of Adults Who Report Consuming Vegetables Less Than Once Daily, Percent of Adults Who Report Consuming Fruits Less Than Once Daily, Percentage of Adults with High Blood Cholesterol, Prevalence of Cancer Among Adults, Prevalence of Depression Among Adults, and Prevalence of Coronary Heart Disease Among Adults.
The average ranking of states that expanded Medicaid was “23,” with a “1” being the best possible score. For the states that chose not to expand Medicaid, their average ranking was “35.5,” much closer the worst possible score of “50”.
For those who think it’s important, the difference of means test was statistically significant.
It’s not the only analysis I’ve run on Medicaid. I also looked at how healthy people feel in an article for the Cobb County Courier.
“Are those states which refuse the money for covering more of their lower income residents doing better, or worse, for their own citizens?” I wrote. “To test this, I look at Statista’s ‘Health in the U.S. States: Statistics & Facts.‘ Survey data published by John Elflein late in 2024 reveals how many women reported their health as only fair or poor, as well as how many men considered their health only fair or poor.”
“Of the ten states that didn’t take the Medicaid expansion, women in those states were more likely to report being in only fair or poor condition, compared to states that did expand Medicaid,” I wrote in the Cobb County Courier. The results were statistically significant. Moreover, five of those states are in the top 12 states reporting the most cases of fair to poor health for women. Of all the states, none which expanded Medicaid is among the bottom 15 for women with fair to poor health.
“It’s a similar story for men. Of the ten states that didn’t expand Medicaid, five of them are among the top 12 states for cases of fair-to-poor health for men. The states which failed to expand Medicaid are also more likely to have men report being either in fair or poor health, though the relationship is not as strong as it is for women.”
The relationship between Medicaid for state residents and healthy ranks and outcomes for its citizens is pretty strong, which is why there is bipartisan support for the program. Hopefully, Medicaid will avoid some of the proposed draconian budget cuts in Washington, DC, given the effectiveness of its expansion in many of the states.