States expanding Medicaid coverage got an unexpected benefit from doing so: They saw increased employment levels among people with disabilities.
According to Reuters Health, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, disabled people with low-paying jobs were often unable to pay for their often costly medical care. As a result, they chose unemployment so they could qualify for Medicaid.
But when the ACA gave states the option to expand Medicaid coverage, that situation changed for at least some recipients. Under expansion rules, people earning up to 138 percent of the poverty rate could be covered under Medicaid — and more of them went to work.
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"Policy makers in states that have not expanded Medicaid often suggest that making Medicaid available to more people will increase their dependence on public insurance and discourage them from working to obtain insurance through an employer," Jean Hall, a health and disability policy researcher at the University of Kansas Medical Center and lead author of the study, says in the report.
Hall added, "Our results show just the opposite for people with disabilities, who are much more likely to work in states that expanded Medicaid."
Working with data from a national phone survey, researchers compared disabled respondents' employment rates in states with expanded Medicaid eligibility with rates for those in states that did not expand Medicaid, both before and after the ACA took effect, and found that disabled workers in expanded Medicaid states were significantly more likely to be working than disabled workers in states that had not expanded the program.
In the 19 states that didn't expand Medicaid, coverage was restricted to those earning no more than 83 percent of the poverty rate; that comes to just $834 a month. And in those states, only 32 percent of disabled respondents were working — compared with 38 percent of disabled respondents in states that had expanded Medicaid coverage.
Forty percent of respondents in expansion states said they were not working because of their disability, while 48 percent in states that had not expanded the program said they were not working because of their disability.
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