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Does the jump in diabetes cases in states that expanded Medicaid mean the Affordable Care Act is starting to see results? (Star-Ledger file photo)

Put aside for a moment the debate about the Affordable Care Act's politics, budget implications, attempts at repeal or court challenges.

Instead, focus on this aspect: Is there any way to tell if Obamacare is making Americans any healthier?

The people at Quest Diagnostics were talking at their Madison headquarters last August when someone wondered if their massive data base of lab test results could shed some light on the question. Intrigued by the possibility, they chose to look at diabetes, said Harvey Kaufman, Quest's senior medical officer.

What they found was the states in which Medicaid was expanded saw a 23 percent increase in newly diagnosed cases of diabetes. By contrast, the states that decided against expansion saw only a 0.4 percent increase.

Furthermore, the diabetes cases in the expansion states tended to be caught earlier, thus giving patients and doctors a better shot at preventing the disease's most severe consequences.

The results are published online today in Diabetes Care. The study's release coincides with the fifth anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

"We had people coming in earlier in their progression of their disease," Kaufman said. "By coming in early, there's less damage to their body caused by the diabetes, and one can attempt to slow the progression of the disease. So there will be fewer heart attacks, strokes, kidney transplants, amputations, blindness and premature death."

New Jersey is among the states that expanded its Medicaid program to include single adults and childless couples. Until then, the program was mostly limited to families with children. (While New Jersey's lab tests were included in Quest's overall calculations, no state-specific data was available.)

The study's design was pretty simple: Researchers took more than 400,000 test results for diabetes and stripped out any information that could identify a patient, such as name, address, and even zip code.

Then they put the data into two large piles: One for tests from the 26 states that had expanded Medicaid and a second pile for tests from the 24 states that didn't expand Medicaid.

Next they looked at new diagnoses of diabetes in the first half of 2013, before Obamacare went into effect, and compared them with the diagnoses in the first half of 2014, after the law took effect.

Nationwide, the Medicaid program saw growth of 18 percent because of those expansion states. Yet in those states, diabetes diagnoses jumped 23 percent. "We think there was a backlog of people waiting to get care," Kaufman said.

"Clearly, expanding Medicaid has allowed those 26 states that did so to identify a large number of people who previously did not know they were living with diabetes," said Vivian Fonseca, a diabetes expert at Tulane University School of Medicine and a co-author of the research.

The data also revealed more men were having their diabetes diagnosed for the first time than women - 25 percent in the expansion states, versus 22 percent for women in those same states. The researchers theorize that because women in general are more likely to go to the doctor, their diabetes cases may have already been discovered.

One skeptic about the study was Arizona internist Jane Orient, president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a lobbying group that opposes government interference with medicine, and seeks the repeal of Obamacare.

"Does Medicaid expansion get you into a doctor's office? Not necessarily," she responded by email when asked about the study's conclusions. "Does getting Type 2 diabetes diagnosed earlier improve your health? Maybe not. Over-treatment of blood sugar with drugs can also be harmful. And patients might gain a lot of weight, making their insulin resistance and ultimate outcome worse. But Quest will get more business."

As a final part of the study, researchers peeked at the actual blood tests to see what they could learn about the diabetes cases. Here, they found the new cases being uncovered in the expansion states were being found at an early stage of the disease.

That has cost implications down the road, said Fonseca, noting that the toll taken by severe diabetes - kidney transplants, blindness, amputations and dialysis - "are extremely expensive."

According to the American Diabetes Association, diabetes treatment eats up one out of every ten dollars spent on health care, for an estimated total of $245 billion in 2012.

Kathleen O'Brien may be reached at kobrien@njadvancemedia.com, or at (732) 902-4557. Follow her on Twitter @OBrienLedger. Find NJ.com on Facebook.