Minneapolis Fed economist Andrew Goodman-Bacon recently published a report examining how the rollout of Medicaid in the late 1960s affected people who were children at the time.

Today, Medicaid is one of the biggest and most critical welfare programs, providing free health insurance for nearly a quarter of Americans. But at the time, it was kind of a thrown-together program, an attempt by House Ways and Means Chair Wilbur Mills during negotiations on legislation to create Medicare to appease skeptics who thought the federal government should only subsidize health care for low-income people through the states. (Jill Quadagno’s One Nation, Uninsured has a great history of these negotiations.)

Mills designed Medicare Part A to appeal to lefties who wanted a traditional social insurance program funded with payroll taxes, and Medicaid as a state-based component, building on an earlier health coverage law he wrote with Sen. Robert Kerr (D-OK) called the Kerr-Mills Act. But Kerr-Mills had been a miserable failure that covered less than 1 percent of the elderly population it targeted. So this time, the law added a requirement that states cover everyone currently on their welfare programs.

Goodman-Bacon found that getting Medicaid as a young child saves lives: It reduces mortality in the affected population. It also reduces rates of disability and receipt of disability benefits, which makes sense if recipients’ health has improved. It also increases employment for recipients once they grow up.

It helps so much, in fact, that it saves the government money in the long term. The fiscal benefits of the policy to the government, Goodman-Bacon concludes, amounted to about $200 billion (in 2017 dollars) if you calculated the net present value in 1965, compared to a coverage cost of roughly $92 billion.

Read the full article about Medicare for kids by Dylan Matthews at Vox.