{"id":515196,"date":"2010-04-05T05:00:07","date_gmt":"2010-04-05T09:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/economics\/2010\/04\/05\/will-health-law-mean-more-hospital-visits-from-young-adults\/"},"modified":"2010-04-05T05:00:07","modified_gmt":"2010-04-05T09:00:07","slug":"will-health-law-mean-more-hospital-visits-from-young-adults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/515196","title":{"rendered":"Will Health Law Mean More Hospital Visits From Young Adults?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One provision of the health-care bill that is now law says that parents will be able to keep their dependent children on their health insurance policies up to age 26.<\/p>\n

New work by a trio of economists, circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests that could produce a significant increase in demand for health care from previously uninsured young adults. Using the National Health Interview Survey and records from hospital emergency and in-patient departments from seven states to track the habits of young adults who lose their insurance when they leave school or “age out,” the economists find that hospital visits by young people fall sharply when they fall off their parents\u0092 insurance.<\/p>\n

” \u0091Aging out\u0092 results in an abrupt 5 to 8 percentage point reduction in the probability of having health insurance,” Michael Anderson of the University of California at Berkeley, Carlos Dobkin of the University of California at Santa Cruz and Tal Gross of the University of Miami write. And “not having insurance leads to a 40% increase in emergency-department visits and a 61% reduction in inpatient hospital admissions.” (Put differently: a 10% decrease in the insurance-coverage rate reduces visits to emergency rooms by 4% and in-patient hospital visits by 6.1%.) The findings challenge the notion that the uninsured are getting care in emergency rooms because they can\u0092t get it elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The obvious implication: “Expanding health insurance coverage would result in a substantial increase in care provided to currently uninsured individuals.”<\/p>\n

Young adults make up one of the biggest groups of the uninsured. About 45%of those between the ages of 19 and 29 were uninsured for at least part of 2009, according to a Commonwealth Fund survey last summer of 2,002 young adults. This is significantly higher than the 30% reported for 2008 by the Kaiser Family Foundation\u0092s Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, and may be a result of the continuing economic downturn.<\/p>\n

For details on this provision of the health-care law, which takes effect in September 2010, see: http:\/\/www.kaiserhealthnews.org\/Stories\/2010\/April\/02\/Insurance-for-Adult-Children.aspx<\/a><\/p>\n

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One provision of the health-care bill that is now law says that parents will be able to keep their dependent children on their health insurance policies up to age 26. New work by a trio of economists, circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests that could produce a significant increase in demand for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":850,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}