The Effect of Medicaid Access on Emergency Department Use

Data from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment must be interpreted narrowly.

Lacking enough funds to cover everyone who was eligible, Oregon created a lottery in 2008 to distribute Medicaid access. Researchers studied administrative data from Portland emergency departments (EDs) to compare ED use among randomly selected lottery winners and losers during the first 18 months after the lottery started.

Data for about 25,000 lottery participants were studied. People who won the lottery and enrolled in Medicaid made an average of 1.43 ED visits per person during the study period versus 1.02 visits per person for those who lost the lottery – a 40% relative increase.

Author

Daniel J. Pallin, MD, MPH

Disclosures

Consultant/Advisory BoardPortola Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Speaker’s BureauPeerView Institute for Medical Education

Grant/Research SupportAgency for Healthcare Research and Quality; CDC; NIH–National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences; NIH–National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); NIH–NIAID–Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group; Merck; Pfizer; Boehringer-Ingelheim; Shire; Portola Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Novartis; bioMérieux; Siemens; Rapid Pathogen Screening; Magnolia; Stago; Innovative Biosensors; Molecular Detection, Inc.; Dyax Corp.; Trius Pharmaceuticals

Daniel J. Pallin, MD, MPH

Disclosures

Consultant/Advisory BoardPortola Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Speaker’s BureauPeerView Institute for Medical Education

The Effect of Medicaid Access on Emergency Department Use

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