Medicaid Expansion is Good for Hospitals

The ever reliable Sarah Kliff recently posted a nice graphic, showing a dramatic decline in the number of hospital visits for which hospitals received little to no money, because the patients have no insurance. But this decline occurred almost exclusively in states that expanded Medicaid: Political partisanship prevented many states from expanding Medicaid, despite the…

| |

Here's Why Funding Medical Education Helps Vulnerable Patients

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in June (no one accused me of being a timely blogger!) shows that academic medical centers often provide poorly-reimbursed services that other healthcare institutions avoid. Where more general hospitals might avoid having psychiatric emergencies available, 90% of academic medical centers offer such services: Whereas only 4%…

Has the Obamacare Medicaid Expansion Already Reached Its Peak?

The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid eligibility this year in those states which decided to follow its provisions. That means lots of people are now newly eligible for Medicaid. However, the number of people signing up for Medicaid in the states has been underwhelming. Which raises a question: how much can we expect enrollment numbers…

Medicaid Expansion/Lack of Expansion Plans: In A Map

For anyone interested in health policy, Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post has perhaps the most useful and informative blog to be found. Here’s a picture she posted recently, showing the status of state Medicaid programs, in a post exploring which states she expects to be revisiting their decisions about how, or whether, to expand in…

Do People Move Across State Borders To Receive Generous Medicaid Benefits?

I teach an undergraduate health policy class at Duke University. Recently, my students asked me whether states potentially hurt themselves by offering generous health care benefits when neighboring states don’t offer such benefits. Then I got home and pulled out a recent issue of Health Affairs, and read the results of a study suggesting that this…

Why Many Physicians Are Reluctant to See Medicaid Patients

In an earlier post, I presented some data on which kind of physicians in the United States are most and least likely to see new patients who receive Medicaid, the state/federal program to pay healthcare costs for low income people. Now a recent study lays out some reasons why many physicians are so reluctant to see such patients….