Study: Medicaid patients use emergency room more, not less « Hot Air

Study: Medicaid patients use emergency room more, not less « Hot Air: "We’ve seen real-world evidence that Medicaid increases emergency room utilization before, in states like California. But the Oregon study should settle any lingering debate.

These results, reported by Peter Suderman at Reason, were reported in the journal Science and are based on the Medicaid study in Oregon that made news in May for showing Medicaid patients had no material health improvements over the uninsured.

The Oregon study is important because it’s a randomized controlled trial— the research gold standard we’ve reported on before in studies like the Tennessee Pre-K study and the Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship study. Washington state held a lottery for access to Medicaid and then studied both the cohort that got Medicaid and the cohort that did not. This means the cohorts were randomly selected within a group of people with similar motivations, economic situations, etc., making them more accurately comparable."

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