View Research by Author - Megan McGrath

Publications

In 2014, many states will expand Medicaid to cover their poor and near-poor residents, but others will not. As the final undecided states make up their minds, a new report shows that in 10 diverse states, very different approaches were taken to analyzing impacts. Those states that conducted comprehensive analyses found that Medicaid expansion will: (a) provide state savings and revenues that exceed increased costs, yielding net state budget gains and (b) result in increased employment because of the influx of federal dollars.

John Holahan and Megan McGrath use the Current Population Survey to provide a 2010-2011 update on a previous paper examining trends in health insurance coverage. Despite the continued economic strain faced by states, the number of nonelderly uninsured dropped by 1.2 million. Most of this decline occurred among adults because of an increase in both public and private nongroup coverage. The number of uninsured children fell as well, almost entirely because of an increase in public coverage. The paper also looks at the impact of the Affordable Care Act on coverage of young adults, as well as trends in coverage across work status, race/ethnicity and region.

This brief compares changes in health insurance coverage from 2000 to 2010 across nonelderly racial and ethnic groups. We find that employer-sponsored insurance deteriorated among all groups, with whites and blacks experiencing larger percentage point declines relative to Hispanics and Asians/other. The uninsured rate increased by four percentage points among whites and blacks, while remaining constant for the Hispanic and Asian/other populations as Medicaid/CHIP enrollment gains were large enough to offset ESI declines for these groups. These general patterns were found across all income groups, with more pronounced deterioration in coverage among those with income below 400 percent of FPL.

Return to list of authors