Insurance instability and use of emergency and office-based care after gaining coverage: An observational cohort study

Paul R Shafer, Stacie B Dusetzina, Lindsay M Sabik, Timothy F Platts-Mills, Sally C Stearns and Justin G Trogdon

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 9, 1-12

Abstract: Background: The Affordable Care Act led to improvements in reporting a usual source of care, but it is unclear whether patients are changing their usual source of care in response to coverage gains. We assess whether prior insurance instability is associated with changes in use of emergency and office-based care after the Marketplace and Medicaid expansion were introduced. Methods: Our study draws from the 2013–14 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, identifying a cohort of non-elderly adults with full-year health insurance coverage in 2014. We use linear and multinomial logistic regression to assess the relationship between insurance instability prior to 2014 (uninsured for 1–11 months, ≥12 months) and person-level changes in use of health care after gaining coverage (change in ED and office visits from 2013 to 2014) with continuously insured individuals serving as a comparison group. Results: Being uninsured for at least one year prior to gaining full-year coverage in 2014 was associated with a 33% increase in ED visits (0.06 visits, p

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0238100 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 38100&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0238100

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238100

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().