Medicaid improved mental health for uninsured

WASHINGTON (AP) — If you’re uninsured, getting on Medicaid clearly improves your mental health, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference in physical conditions such as high blood pressure.

The counterintuitive findings by researchers at Harvard and MIT, from an experiment involving low-income, able-bodied Oregonians, appear in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. The study offers a twist for states weighing a major Medicaid expansion under President Barack Obama’s health care law, to serve a similar population of adults around the country.