NEJM releases two reports on Medicaid expansion

Posted on July 26, 2012 | No Comments
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Two new reports, released by the New England Journal of Medicine, analyze the impact of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). “The Supreme Court and the Future of Medicaid,” authored by Timothy Stoltzfus Jost and Sara Rosenbaum, reviews both the Supreme Court’s majority and dissenting Medicaid expansion arguments and addresses three outstanding questions regarding the ruling.

On June 28th, the Supreme Court found the ACA’s Medicaid expansion unconstitutional, but instead of striking the expansion, it simply prevented the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from enforcing the expansion as a mandate. Practically, this turns Medicaid expansion into an option, although the law itself remains unchanged.

Rosenbaum and Jost pose three questions regarding the Court’s decision: 1) Which ACA Medicaid reforms are affected? 2) How far does the Court’s new coercion doctrine go? and 3) How will the states respond?

The Jost/Rosenbaum piece cites another Journal article by Sommers et al. entitled, “Mortality and Access to Care among Adults after State Medicaid Expansions,” which provides an analysis of the impact of Medicaid expansion in New York, Maine, and Arizona. The authors found that Medicaid expansion in these states contributed not only to improved health care coverage, but also to reduced mortality.

To access the policy research brief authored by Jost and Rosenbaum, click here.

To access the study by Sommers et al., click here.

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