Medicaid Expansion Reduced Uncompensated Care Costs At Louisiana Hospitals; May Be A Model For Other States.

We examined changes in hospital uncompensated care costs in the context of Louisiana's Medicaid expansion. Louisiana remains the only state in the Deep South to have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and can serve as a model for states that have not adopted expansion, many of which are located in the South census region. We found that Medicaid expansion was associated with a 33 percent reduction in the share of total operating expenses attributable to uncompensated care costs for general medical and surgical hospitals in Louisiana in the first three years after expansion.

Medicaid Expansion And Health Services Use For Adults Experiencing Homelessness In Arkansas.

More than 500,000 people in the US experience homelessness at any given time, many of whom now qualify for Medicaid in states that expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In this article we use a novel data set from Arkansas to provide the first estimates of the association between gaining coverage through the ACA's Medicaid expansion and health services use for a population experiencing homelessness. We find that Medicaid expansion was associated with large initial increases in inpatient hospitalizations and emergency department visits-which declined steadily over time-among adults experiencing homelessness compared with use by a sample of adult traditional Medicaid enrollees.