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Medica Research Institute to Study Pent-Up Demand in Health CareMINNEAPOLIS --(Business Wire)-- The Medica Research Institute is launching a study that will examine the health care utilization and characteristics of newly enrolled members in Medicaid and MNsure, Minnesota's health insurance exchange. Study findings will help to pinpoint how people are using health care as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rolls out, and it will inform policy decisions around ACA. The eighteen-month-long study will analyze newly insured populations in Minnesota to determine whether there is evidence of pent-up demand, and, if so, whether that high level of demand persists over time. The work is funded by the State Health Access Reform Evaluation (SHARE) program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and done in collaboration with the Urban Institute. "We are excited to dig into the data to understand the factors that are driving health care utilization as ACA begins," says study director Dr. Angela Fertig, research investigator for the Medica Research Institute. "Our findings will be critical for assessing both the long-term costs of covering the newly insured and projecting the ongoing health care needs of the newly insured under the ACA. As an example, we have already found in preliminary analyses that a greater fraction of men enrolled in Medicaid in 2011, when Minnesota expanded the program to include low-income childless adults. That change in enrollees likely brought with it a shift in demand for certain health care services such as prostate screenings." To learn more, see the "In Brief" analysis released by the Medica Research Institute today. The researchers will use enrollment and claims data from Medica's 1.2 million Minnesota members to examine health care utilization among newly enrolled members of private individual and family (non-group) plans in Minnesota's exchange and in the Medicaid program. The team will look for evidence of pent-up demand among these groups-for example, whether care is focused on diagnostic testing, preventive screening, and initial care visits in the early period of ACA. The researchers will look at whether that sort of care remains high or declines over time. They will also study how the care for newly insured adults compares with that of adults with ongoing coverage. "When caring for someone who has had no previous access to health care, there are often a lot of primary care visits, tests, and diagnostic costs," says Fertig. "When you think of the ACA rollout, you realize this sort of delayed care is happening on a very large scale. Not understanding the impact of this pent-up demand makes it difficult to project care costs and physician supply." While Minnesota stands out as an early adopter of the tenantsof the ACA, the state is a good model for understanding health care markets nationally. The state's physician supply, hospital capacity, and managed care penetration are all close to U.S. averages. While the socioeconomic characteristics of Minnesota's population don't mirror the U.S. population, the researchers will reweight the sample group to look more like the national population.
About the Medica Research Institute
About Medica
About the Urban Institute
About the State Health Access Reform Evaluation
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