Study: Arkansas' Medicaid work requirement did not boost employment
A study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Arkansas’ Medicaid work requirement led to lower levels of health insurance coverage among 30- to 49-year-olds in 2018, the group targeted by the first-of-its-kind work rule last year. The researchers also concluded that the policy did not lead to a rise in employment among this target population.
Benjamin Sommers, the study’s lead author, said researchers compared 30- to 49-year-old low-income adults in Arkansas with other age groups, as well as their counterparts in Kentucky, Louisiana and Texas. The study was limited to households that earned less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line — the eligibility cutoff for Medicaid expansion — and was conducted by telephone survey in November and December. Respondents were asked about their work status and insurance status at that time and during the same month a year earlier, in 2017. In total, 1,500 Arkansans and a similar number of people from the other three states were interviewed.
“The share of people who are working when you compare across the groups by age and by state seems to be pretty similar,” Sommers, a health economist and physician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a phone interview Monday. “So if the goal of the policy is to get 30- to 49-year-olds in Arkansas into new jobs, that doesn’t seem to have happened, at least through the end of 2018.”
However, the researchers did find one significant difference between the groups: “Uninsured rates increased among 30-49 year-old Arkansans from 10.5% in 2016 to 14.5% in 2018, with smaller or no changes in the other groups,” the study says. (The researchers didn’t find a significant reduction in access to medical care, though Sommers said such “downstream effects” would not be measurable until later.)
Read more: https://www.swtimes.com/news/20190623/study-arkansas-medicaid-work-requirement-did-not-boost-employment
(Fort Smith Times Record)
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