Medicaid expansion improves access to care and addresses health gaps in the 11 states that have opted against Medicaid expansion.
What is Medicare / Medicaid? - Eligibility - Payment - Reference
Medicaid / Medicare are different governmental programs that provide medical and health-related services to specific groups of people in U.S. and managed by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Medicaid / Medicare are different governmental programs that provide medical and health-related services to specific groups of people in U.S. and managed by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
‘Preventable hospitalizations and emergency department visits are key health metrics for assessing access to outpatient care.’
Benefit expansion didn’t affect the relatively smaller disparities in preventable hospitalizations and ED visits between Hispanics and non-Hispanic white adults. The study didn’t examine disparities between white and Asian adults.
Hospital Utilization and Expenditures in a Medicaid Population
“These include hospitalizations for diabetes or high blood pressure that are preventable with high-quality community level care,” said Sujoy Chakravarty, an associate research professor and health economist at the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy and a lead author of the study, published in Health Affairs. “The decline in disparities indicates that increased coverage through Medicaid expansion was an effective tool for providing valuable care to underserved communities.”Starting in 2014, the Affordable Care Act allowed states (and encouraged them with subsidies) to expand Medicaid coverage to adults with income up to 138 percent of federal poverty thresholds.
The researchers utilized hospitalization data from 29 states and ED data from 26 states to understand the effects by comparing changes in disparities in states that expanded to states that didn’t expand eligibility.
Quiz on Health Insurance
This Quiz is to test your knowledge on health insurance in the U.S, there is so much activity with the new law and building of Health Exchanges – all peaking for a January 2014 deadline.
This Quiz is to test your knowledge on health insurance in the U.S, there is so much activity with the new law and building of Health Exchanges – all peaking for a January 2014 deadline.
In the five years after expansion became possible, Black-white disparities in preventable hospitalizations – as defined by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Prevention Quality Indicators – decreased more in expansion states than non-expansion states reflecting a 10.4 percent decrease in disparities associated with the Medicaid expansion.
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The effects are significant in the context of the large disparities that existed before 2014. Rates of preventable hospitalizations and ED visits for non-Hispanic Black adults were 2.1 to 2.7 times those of non-Hispanic white adults in 2011–13.
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Nearly 50% of Kids on Medicaid Lack Outpatient Follow-up
After the initial Emergency Department discharge, less than 1/3rd of kids had mental health follow-up within seven days.
After the initial Emergency Department discharge, less than 1/3rd of kids had mental health follow-up within seven days.
“The federal government has established statutes for Medicaid programs, but states apply for waivers to innovate care by covering new services or populations,” said Chakravarty, who leads a team of researchers evaluating the effects of several such experiments in New Jersey. “State waivers may allow coverage of upstream services such as housing or transportation, and access to these social determinants of health are critical for ensuring health and equity.”
Source-Eurekalert
