Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
No, I meant going from 0 access to care to some access to care improves health, as we are discussing the medicaid study comparing people on medicaid to the uninsured.
I currently work as a statistician for a large HMO, and I can tell you for us, medicaid patients generally get the 'patch-you-up-and-out-the-door' treatment because odds are high we won't be getting reimbursed in any kind of timely fashion. I've worked in a few states, and it seems pretty common for medicaid to be fairly underfunded (hence the Oregon study we are discussing).
And generally, providing medicaid is moving someone from emergency-only to some-primary-care, which is where we should expect some impact- this isn't increasing treatment on the margin, its providing minimal care to a largely untreated population.
So I randomly sampled ~5 in the first two pages, and 3 of those were articles about overtreatment that had a sidebar to a different article discussing some aspect of medicaid, so I'm not sure if the count is meaningful here. (The other 2 were about some loophole dentists were using to overtreat children on medicaid and bill extra, I have no knowledge of dental claims).
This does not appear to be the actual change in access to care when going from being uninsured to on medicaid. As you mention, uninsured patients receive emergency-only care.