Medicaid Expansion And Community Health Centers: Care Quality And Service Use Increased For Rural Patients.

ABSTRACT: Medicaid expansion had great potential to affect community health centers (CHCs), particularly in rural areas, because their patients are predominantly low income and disproportionately uninsured. Using data for 2011-15 on all CHCs, we found that after two years Medicaid expansion was associated with an 11.44-percentage-point decline in the share of CHC patients who were uninsured and a 13.15-percentage-point increase in the share with Medicaid. Changes in quality and volume were consistently observed in rural CHCs in expansion states, which had relative improvements in asthma treatment, body mass index screening and follow-up, and hypertension control, along with substantial increases in volumes for eighteen of twenty-one types of visits-particularly those for mammograms, abnormal breast

SUBMITTER: Cole MB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6286055 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature