The most prominent of these is a University of Virginia study of nearly 900, 000 patients, published in Annals of Surgery, showing that surgical patients on Medicaid endured a 97 percent higher likelihood of in-hospital death than patients with private insurance and a 13 percent greater chance of death than those with no insurance at all.

FORBES: States Face a "Sophie's Choice" on Medicaid Expansion

Consider a case report in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery of a three-year-old girl who fell into an icy fishpond in a small Austrian town in the Alps.

NEWYORKER: The Checklist