(credit: Dr.Farouk)

Researchers at Harvard surveyed the health of nearly 9,000 low-income people in Texas, Arkansas, and Kentucky from 2013 to 2015. During this time, Arkansas and Kentucky expanded Medicaid healthcare under the Affordable Care Act while Texas did not. In the course of the study, survey respondents in Arkansas and Kentucky not only reported improvements in their access and quality of care, but were five percent more likely to report being in excellent health compared to their counterparts in Texas.

While the findings are perhaps not surprising, they offer some of the first hard data that the ACA is actually improving the health of the 20 million Americans that gained insurance under the elaborate health law. However, the authors caution that it’s just a correlation. The data doesn’t directly prove ACA’s role in any health improvements captured. In the words of the Harvard researchers, the study design “precludes any clear causal interpretation.”