Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Do African Americans and Latinos receive the same quality care as Caucasians? This is the question asked by Horvitz-Lennon et al. (2014). Quality of Care Before one can answer this question, one first has to define what “quality care” means. The authors use the following definition for pharmacological indicators: Any use of antipsychotic drugs, Conditional on…
The Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act with one major exception; it declared that states did not have to expand their Medicaid eligibility rules. However, the ACA may have indirectly increased Medicaid enrollment even in States that did not change their eligilbity rules. Avalere Health reports that: 17 of the 26 states that did not…
The Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act was legal with one exception: the federal government could not require states to increase Medicaid eligibility. Although States were not required to make Medicaid eligibility more generous, the did have an incentive to do so. The federal government will pay 90% of the cost of enrolling…
Many health care wonks know that Medicaid covers long-term care for poor elderly individuals. However, the impact of Medicaid among the elderly may be underappreciated. As a paper by Di Nardi, French and Jones, finds: Among respondents in the lowest quintile of lifetime income, nearly seventy percent are receiving Medicaid at age 74. Medicaid use…
Many people claim Medicaid recipients are moochers, relying on the federal government. Further, Medicaid costs states a lot of money. Why don’t Medicaid programs just raise copays to reduce unnecessary use of medical care? The reason is that the vast majority of Medicaid beneficiaries don’t spend too much money. Medicaid is expensive mostly due to…
Consumers in 30 states (60%) will have the option of at least one plan operating as both a qualified health plan (QHP) in the health insurance exchange (HIX) and as a Medicaid managed care organization (MMCO), according to an Avalere analysis. In these states, Medicaid beneficiaries may be able to enroll in a plan offered…
According to a recent Health Affairs article, the primary (but not only) reason is reimbursement rates: Consistent with the results of prior research,8–11 physicians in the focus groups cited low Medicaid reimbursement rates as a serious problem that limited their willingness to care for Medicaid patients… Administrative data from 2010 show that the Medicaid-to-Medicare ratio…
Recently in the news, a psuedo-randomized trial of Oregon’s Medicaid expansion found that people with Medicaid used more healthcare services. They use more doctor visits, more medications and even a few more ER visits and hospitalizations (though these last two were not statistically significant). Some policymakers believed that insurance will decrease ER visits and hosptializations…
Only about 50% to 60% of individuals eligible for Medicaid actually take-up the coverage. Why is this case? Many people claim that individuals only take up Medicaid insurance when they get sick. Others claim that state outreach efforts have been subpar. Youjin Hahn, however, offers another explanation rates: Medicaid insurance is just not that valuable. The…
Perhaps the most important paper on the effect of health insurance on health, spending, and access to care was released this week. Although randomized controlled trials are rare for measuring the effect of insurance, the design of the Oregon Medicaid program introduced random variation into who received Medicaid coverage. The authors write: In 2008, Oregon…