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POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS

Coverage Gap Widening Between Medicaid Expansion States and Others

People in states that have adopted health reform’s Medicaid expansion had a lower uninsured rate in 2013 (before the expansion took effect) than people in non-expansion states — and non-expansion states are falling further behind in 2014, several recent government and independent surveys reveal.

Some 14.1 percent of the people in the 27 states (including Washington, D.C.) that have expanded Medicaid lacked health insurance in 2013, compared to 17.3 percent in the 24 non-expansion states, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (see chart).

Next year’s Census data, which will reflect the substantial coverage gains expected in expansion states in 2014 due to the expansion (which took effect January 1), should show a further widening of this coverage gap.

Results from several independent surveys — and this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the first government survey data showing health reform’s early impacts — show that this is already happening.  For example, the Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey found that the uninsured rate for non-elderly adults in expansion states fell from 16.2 percent to 10.1 percent between the third quarter of 2013 and the second quarter of 2014, compared to a decline from 20.0 percent to 18.3 percent in non-expansion states.

Health reform’s Medicaid expansion creates a pathway to coverage for all non-elderly adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line, including, for the first time, low-income adults without children.  However, the 2012 Supreme Court decision upholding health reform made the expansion a state option.  States can opt in to the expansion at any time; the federal government will pick up all of the cost through 2016 and nearly all of the cost thereafter.

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