Our Health Policy Matters

For many, the fight over whether or not to expand Medicaid is just about the money.  But they overlook the fact that the lives of more than 36,000 people may hang in the balance.  That’s the conclusion that can be drawn from a study published last summer in the New England Journal of Medicine.  The study was entitled Mortality and Access to Care Among Adults After State Medicaid Expansions .  In it, the authors calculated the numbers of lives saved as a result of an earlier Medicaid expansion in three states. The three states were Arizona, New York, and Maine.  And while none of these expansion populations matched exactly the expansion population in the Affordable Care Act, they were similar enough to suggest that we might see the same results in the ACA Medicaid expansion population. The authors concluded that Medicaid expansions could save 19.6 lives for every 100,000 people between the ages of 20 and 64.  There are over 185 million Am...

For many, the fight over whether or not to expand Medicaid is just about the money.  But they overlook the fact that the lives of more than 36,000 people may hang in the balance.  That’s the conclusion that can be drawn from a study published last summer in the New England Journal of Medicine.  The study was entitled Mortality and Access to Care Among Adults After State Medicaid Expansions .  In it, the authors calculated the numbers of lives saved as a result of an earlier Medicaid expansion in three states. The three states were Arizona, New York, and Maine.  And while none of these expansion populations matched exactly the expansion population in the Affordable Care Act, they were similar enough to suggest that we might see the same results in the ACA Medicaid expansion population. The authors concluded that Medicaid expansions could save 19.6 lives for every 100,000 people between the ages of 20 and 64.  There are over 185 million Am...