Once the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion is implemented, the Medicaid population as a whole will be younger, whiter, healthier, and more male but also more likely to smoke and drink to excess than it is today.
That is the conclusion reached by in a new report published in the Annals of Family Medicine.
This means that spending per recipient may not be as great for new Medicaid recipients as it is for current beneficiaries and that a different patient population may need different approaches to addressing different health challenges.
Learn more about the study and its implications in the article “Potential Adult Medicaid Beneficiaries Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Compared With Current Adult Medicaid Beneficiaries, which can be found here, on the web site of the journal Annals of Family Medicine.