Comment | How Medicaid is improving health
We all want to live in a thriving community where everyone has the chance to succeed. The building blocks of such a community include a good education, safe neighborhoods, reliable roads and healthy people – and insurance coverage is foundational for ensuring we are all healthy. Thanks to the Medicaid expansion, more and more Kentuckians’ loved ones and neighbors are able to take a stake in their own health care, and all of us will benefit because of it.
In fact, if we’ve learned anything from the past two and a half years of the Medicaid expansion, it’s that people are able to engage in their health care exactly because they are covered in the first place. Here are some examples of how more Kentuckians are taking ownership of their health care because of the Medicaid expansion:
Already, according to an important new academic study, there’s been a 4.8 percent increase in low-income adults who report they have “excellent health” in Kentucky and Arkansas, which expanded Medicaid, compared to Texas, which did not. Not only are people taking the right actions to get healthier, they are reporting better health.
For the past few decades, wages have been stagnant for many Kentucky workers, good jobs are too scarce and employers are less often providing needed benefits. In 1980, 70 percent of Kentucky workers were covered through employer-sponsored health plans; today that has fallen to 56 percent. That’s why most of those covered by the Medicaid expansion are working now — they just work in low-wage jobs, most commonly in restaurants, construction and retail stores.
One bright spot in our economy the past couple of years has been the health care sector — thanks in part to the federal dollars coming to Kentucky because of Medicaid expansion. In the past two years, the state has added 9,000 jobs in hospitals and outpatient care facilities.
The Medicaid expansion is already saving us money, but there are ways to make it work even better in the long-run, both for those it covers and for the state budget. Options include unfreezing the hospital provider tax that has been capped at 2006 levels despite the billions more dollars in revenue hospitals are receiving and moving Medicaid reimbursements toward a value-based health-care delivery model that focuses more on people getting healthy rather than on the number treatments they receive.
Dustin Pugel is a research and policy associate at the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, www.kypolicy.org.