By: David Machledt
Executive Summary
This updated paper examines the demographics of the Medicaid expansion population and provides insights into how expansion has impacted people with disabilities, people with mental health disorders, parents and caregivers, home health aids, low-wage workers, and self-employed business people.
Medicaid expansion via the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has provided tens of millions of individual adults, mostly low-income workers, people with disabling conditions, students, and parents and family caregivers, with critical health care coverage that is strengthening their lives and communities, as Senior Policy Analyst David Machledt notes in a new paper, “The Faces of Medicaid Expansion: Filling Gaps in Coverage.” Machledt’s paper includes personal stories from Amanda in Illinois, Sandra in Ohio, and Dewey in Michigan that reveal how Medicaid expansion has helped turned their lives around. “These real stories,” Machledt writes, “reflect people who use Medicaid coverage as a springboard to succeed in other aspects of their life, including work, care giving, and being active members of their community.”
This paper was originally published in 2017. The original version can be accessed here.
