Thursday, August 25, 2022 | The Latest Research, Commentary, And News From Health Affairs
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Medicaid Expansion And COVID
In 2019, Virginia expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, extending coverage to more than 500,000 low-income adults in the state by the end of 2021.
Their findings offer
insights on the impact of public health insurance in a time of economic and public health crisis.
They find that Medicaid enrollment was significantly associated with decreases in reporting nonmedical financial needs and decreases in concern about medical costs and medical debts.
Shadowen and coauthors report 5.0 and 7.7 percentage-point decreases in the likelihood of respondents being concerned about paying for housing costs and food, respectively, after twelve months of enrollment compared with the year before enrollment.
Further, the likelihood of being concerned about the cost of normal health care and the cost of catastrophic health care decreased by 33.7 percentage points and
23.8 percentage points, respectively.
The authors also observe advances in equity as a result of Medicaid expansion.
“Non-Hispanic Black and African American members reported larger reductions than non-Hispanic White members in concerns about paying for housing and normal health care costs,” they write.
Finally, the authors find that members who lived in rural areas reported significantly larger decreases in the likelihood of having problems paying medical bills over time after enrolling in Medicaid.
Today in Health Affairs
Forefront, Andrew Spencer Goldman and Reshma Ramachandran argue that the Biden administration should appoint a National Institutes of Health director who will commit to making global equitable access to medical technologies an inseparable aspect of the biomedical innovation ecosystem instead of an
afterthought.
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