Medicaid expansion in Michigan led to an influx of patient care access, more patient engagement and preventive care, according to two new studies from Michigan Medicine. Health Michigan Plan, the state’s Medicaid program, revamped its benefits while designing its expanded health plan as a part of Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The plan emphasized patient access to primary care and patient health literacy. It included how well patients understand their health risks and preventive actions they need to take to keep disease at bay or intervene early on.
Health Michigan Plan developers included certain financial incentives aimed at driving patient engagement in care, like a cut in fees after completing a health risk assessment (HRA). The studies were recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, confirmed that Medicaid expansion led to greater patient access to care.
The first study, initiated by Susan Dorr Goold, MD, MHSA, MA, revealed that more patients were able to access primary care after enrolling in the updated Healthy Michigan Plan.
In a survey of nearly 6,000 members enrolled in Healthy Michigan Plan after 2014, Goold and colleagues observed an influx of patients accessing primary care. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they didn’t have health insurance a year before enrolling in the health plan. This lack of insurance led to delaying care access at least one year prior to Medicaid enrollment in the case of one-third respondents.
Medicaid expansion also improved patient engagement. This is likely the result of better primary care access and meaningful patient-provider communication, authors of the second paper mentioned. Enrollment in the Healthy Michigan Plan also resulted in better patient engagement with preventive care services, the second paper reported.
Taylor Kelley, MD, MPH, MSc, the former IHPI National Clinician Scholar and who now works at the University of Utah said that its too early to tell if the program will lead to sustained behavior change, but its clear that more conversations are happening between doctors and patients about lifestyle change and patients are eager to commit to healthy behaviors. Kelly, was the lead author of the second paper.