Our Health Policy Matters

In the aftermath of the decisions by state governors and legislators not to expand Medicaid, the grim numbers are beginning to roll in.  Failure to expand Medicaid will cost states more than 19,000 lives and over a billion dollars per year. And that, sadly, is only the beginning. Source: RAND Analysis, Health Affairs, June 2013 I wrote about this prospect earlier this year, when I concluded that as many as 36,000 lives could hang in the balance of the Medicaid expansion debate. Now we have some new numbers from a RAND Corporation analysis, published this month by Health Affairs , which quantified the impact of failing to expand Medicaid in fourteen states (as of April 2013) where governors opposed the expansion.  The fourteen states were Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin. It found that in 2016 there would be 3.6 million fewer insured peo...

In the aftermath of the decisions by state governors and legislators not to expand Medicaid, the grim numbers are beginning to roll in.  Failure to expand Medicaid will cost states more than 19,000 lives and over a billion dollars per year. And that, sadly, is only the beginning. Source: RAND Analysis, Health Affairs, June 2013 I wrote about this prospect earlier this year, when I concluded that as many as 36,000 lives could hang in the balance of the Medicaid expansion debate. Now we have some new numbers from a RAND Corporation analysis, published this month by Health Affairs , which quantified the impact of failing to expand Medicaid in fourteen states (as of April 2013) where governors opposed the expansion.  The fourteen states were Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin. It found that in 2016 there would be 3.6 million fewer insured peo...