Most new to Medicaid have no other option if Affordable Care Act repealed

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-04/osu-mnt042417.php

Public Release: 24-Apr-2017
Most new to Medicaid have no other option if Affordable Care Act repealed
Ohioans covered under expansion primarily older, low-income, less-educated whites
Ohio State University

Almost everyone covered through Ohio's Medicaid expansion would have no other viable insurance option should the Affordable Care Act be repealed, a new study has found.

Law and public health researchers from The Ohio State University determined that 95 percent of newly enrolled beneficiaries would be without a plausible pathway to coverage. The research appears online in the American Journal of Public Health.

"Many of these people have nothing else to turn to," said Eric Seiber, lead author and associate professor of health services management and policy in Ohio State's College of Public Health.

"Their choice is Medicaid or medical bankruptcy."

•••••

Though 17.7 percent of survey participants had private health insurance prior to Medicaid enrollment, most had lost their jobs (and their coverage) or were ineligible for employer-sponsored group health plans at the time of enrollment. The researchers found that 4.8 percent of the new Medicaid recipients were eligible for insurance through their jobs, leaving 95.2 percent of new enrollees with no feasible alternative.

Seiber and Berman also found that a rollback would predominantly affect older, low-income whites with less than a college education.

"The impact of insurance is about a lot more than health care," Berman said. "For people newly enrolled in Medicaid, it means that should they have a major health-related event, they can still pay for food, have stable housing, get out of debt. These are all things that make a huge difference in quality of life."

A recent Ohio Medicaid analysis, which was conducted with help from Seiber and Berman and mentioned in the new study, found that that the expansion increased access to medical care, reduced unmet medical needs, improved self-reported health status and alleviated financial distress - all results found in other states that have expanded access to government coverage.

The new study shows that the majority of adults newly enrolled in Medicaid did not drop private insurance in favor of the government coverage, Seiber said.

"These are very low-income adults, many of whom lost their jobs and have nothing to go back to," he said.

•••••