As Barack Obama’s presidency draws to a close, we anticipate growing discussion of his legacy. Much of that discussion will focus on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), his signature legislative accomplishment. The legislation is complex and in some cases ineffective and cumbersome. It can be argued, for example, that the complexity of the ACA favors the same high-cost, legacy health care players that the bill was designed to address.
But one of the major goals of the ACA was to provide more accessible, more dignified, and more effective health care to the poor. And in this respect, we believe that the Affordable Care Act – at least in those states that have elected to expand Medicaid – has been a success.
Our perspective on health care reform comes from ACAView, a joint initiative between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and athenahealth to study the impact of health care reform. We have just released our latest report, The Effects of the Affordable Care Act through 2015, which focuses on the impacts of insurance coverage expansion for patients and providers, with an emphasis on primary care. This report analyzes data from 21,900 health care providers on athenahealth’s network for at least five years. These physicians, who serve communities across the nation, are broadly representative of the country as a whole (please refer to the Appendix of the latest report). This allows us to compare physician practice before and after the coverage expansion provisions went into effect in 2014.
In June 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in “National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius” that states could choose whether or not to expand Medicaid eligibility. Although the federal government would cover the full cost of coverage expansion through 2016 and gradually decreasing to 90 percent of it thereafter, about half of the states declined to provide expanded Medicaid access to low income people. Since that time, six of those states have changed course and made Medicaid available to more of their residents.
In those states that agreed to loosen Medicaid eligibility requirements, there was no guarantee that the law would improve health care access for low income people. Because Medicaid payment levels are much lower than commercial rates, some observers were concerned that physicians would not open their schedules to see more Medicaid patients. And when patients did come in for care, no one knew whether they would form ongoing relationships with physicians or merely receive one-off care for acute or symptomatic issues.
