Wealthy people tend to be healthier, so kindhearted souls tend to argue that we can improve the health of the poor by handing them cash.

But it doesn’t work. Public assistance may be capable of many things, but making poor people healthier is not one of them, which is a lesson we should apply to Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid.

This lesson was reaffirmed this July. A U.S. nonprofit organization provided a $1,000 monthly allowance to 3,000 low-income recipients for three years. A control group of 2,000 low-income people received a paltry $50 each month.

After three years, researchers studied outcomes, comparing the two groups. Specifically, they looked into health and healthcare. Those receiving the larger amount spent more money on healthcare, which is to be expected. But this extra healthcare spending did not translate into measurably better health outcomes.

The researchers asked all sorts of questions. They even did blood tests. “We can rule out even very small improvements in physical health,” they concluded.

“We also find that the transfer did not improve mental health after the first year, and by year 2 we can again reject very small improvements. We also find precise null effects on self-reported access to health care, physical activity, sleep, and several other measures related to preventive care and health behaviors.”

This surprised some — at least one major news outlet conflated higher healthcare spending with “better health” — but it shouldn’t have. A study last decade in Oregon found similar results.

When Oregon expanded Medicaid beyond the poor to the wider working class, it did so by lottery. This created a randomized controlled trial and allowed researchers to see the results of government-provided health insurance.

The result was that government aid provided no measurable improvement in physical health.

Health outcomes, it turns out, can’t be cured with cash. While poor people have worse health outcomes, money isn’t the beginning or end of their problems. There are many explanations. Poorer people are less likely to be raised in stable households, their poverty is sometimes a result of the same bad habits that harm health, and their communities do not promote health habits.

Much of the welfare state is premised on the idea that redistributing wealth will lift the poor. The latest study and the Oregon study suggest otherwise. The one bright spot in Oregon was that it seemed to keep beneficiaries from devastating financial shocks.

Throughout debate over Obamacare, this page repeatedly noted the reasonable moral intuition behind creating a healthcare safety net: (1) nobody should die simply because he or she cannot afford an otherwise available treatment; (2) nobody should become poor because he or she gets cancer.

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Again and again, though, government assistance has proved inept at improving health. The most government can do is prevent people from losing their house because of catastrophic hospital bills.

A federal safety net may do some good, but an allowance from Uncle Sam doesn’t seem to make us live longer or healthier.