Does Private Insurance Provide More Care?

Medicaid provides virtually no-cost coverage to millions of low-income Americans. This study examines whether its beneficiaries realize similar health care access as their counterparts with private insurance. We draw on the 2014-2017 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and control for observable confounding factors across coverage types by estimating and applying entropy weights. Medicaid beneficiaries were moderately more likely to report a usual source of care (74.5% vs 68.1%, p<.01) and approximately equally as likely to report a checkup in the past year as the privately insured (43.5% vs 44.5%, p>.1), each significantly more likely than the uninsured. Medicaid beneficiaries had significantly more prescription fills (12.6 vs 8.2) and emergency-care visits (.26 vs .15) annually than the privately-insured on average, with similar numbers of physician visits. On balance, we did not find evidence that Medicaid was associated with diminished access or utilization relative to private insurance, while both had more access than the uninsured.