Study Confirms Broad Benefits from Medicaid Expansion

Public News Service

By: Dan Heyman

Virginia is one of 19 states that has not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and it is definitively not seeing the benefits of Medicaid across their healthcare and other systems.

Jill Hanken, a staff attorney in the Virginia Poverty Law Center, mentioned that many rural Virginia hospitals will not probably continue their services without expanding Medicaid.

Study co-author Jack Hoadley, a research professor at the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, said they studied safety-net hospitals and clinics in seven states and confirmed that in the states that have expanded Medicaid, it’s relieved a lot of the pressure on health-care providers that struggle to serve the working poor. Hoadley said they’ve seen dramatic evidence that the benefits extend beyond those doctors and patients.

“It’s not just benefiting the patients that are going to come in,” he said, “but it’s having effects on the budgets of the safety-net institutions and really creating savings for the states and their budgets.”

In the last Legislature, the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association offered to support a voluntary tax on state health-care institutions to fund expansion. In contrast, Hoadley said, similar institutions in expansion states say they can now do a much better job meeting the needs of the populations they serve.

“Behavioral health services, some are adding dental services, more specialty care,” he said. “The dollars that are brought into these institutions really are used in ways that fundamentally change the way care is delivered.”

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