(C) Wisconsin Watch
This story was originally published by Wisconsin Watch and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Impact of Medicaid Expansion on State Budgets and Mortality [1]

['David Slusky', 'David Rapson', "Stephen A. O' Connell", 'Marianne Bitler', 'Ann Stevens', 'Amanda Starc', 'Joshua D. Gottlieb', 'Mark Shepard', 'Adriana Kugler', 'Ellen Meara']

Date: 2021-07-21 18:29:42+00:00

Since its implementation in 2014, the expansion of Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act has been optional for states — with the federal government footing the bulk of expansion costs. As of 2021, 12 states have not expanded Medicaid and an estimated 4.0 million uninsured non-elderly adults could become eligible for Medicaid if these states opted to expand their programs. Research on the states that have expanded Medicaid is providing new evidence on the impact of expansion on state balance sheets and on population health. Recent temporary fiscal incentives included in the American Rescue Plan sweetened the deal.

What this Means:

States not expanding Medicaid is resulting in excess deaths among inhabitants of the state. By most calculations of the value of a statistical life, preventing these deaths alone justifies an expansion of a government program for which the state only bears 10% of the cost (e.g., in Kansas, saving 72 lives at a cost of $210 million or $2.9 million per life, which is far below the current EPA estimate of $9.8 million). And this is only the mortality benefits of expansion, and so does not include many other documented benefits, including very recent work showing a 34 percentage point relative decline in new medical debt in states that expanded in 2014. Moreover, states may not end up even paying all of that 10% in net, given offsets from other existing programs and increased provider tax revenue. Even beyond that, to incentivize expansion, the Biden administration will also increase traditional Medicaid funding in a state at a greater magnitude than the 10% cost to a state. So even with the most conservative dynamic assumptions Medicaid expansion saves the state both lives and dollars. And these federal dollars also help the state economy and create new jobs. Given all of these reasons the remaining holdout states have few if any defensible economic or public health reasons to refuse to expand Medicaid.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://econofact.org/impact-of-medicaid-expansion-on-state-budgets-and-mortality

Published and (C) by Wisconsin Watch
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0 Intl.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/wisconsinwatch/