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Expanding Medicaid increases ER visits in Oregon study
By Monte Morin
January 2, 2014, 6:07 p.m.
An Oregon Medicaid expansion program found that low-income adults who were covered by government health insurance had visited hospital emergency rooms 40% more often than other adults.
The study, published online Thursday in the journal Science, comes at a time when many states are expanding Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
While federal and state policymakers have argued that expanding Medicaid would reduce costly and inefficient use of hospital emergency rooms by increasing access to primary healthcare, the Science study suggests this is not the case.
"When you cover the uninsured, emergency room use goes up by a large magnitude," said senior study author and MIT economics professor Amy Finkelstein. "In no case were we able to find any subpopulations, or type of conditions, for which Medicaid caused a significant decrease in emergency department use."
The study was tied to a 2008 Medicaid expansion program in Oregon, in which officials held a lottery to enroll 30,000 eligible adults out of a total pool of 90,000.
http://www.latimes.com/science/scie...-finds-20140102,0,2102014.story#ixzz2pLGXqEP9