Dive Brief:
- New research from the GAO has concluded that Americans who are insured steadily for about six years before Medicare enrollment are more likely to report being healthy during their first six years of Medicare coverage.
- Continuous prior health insurance also led to lower Medicare spending in some service areas.
- In their first year with Medicare, those who were previously covered had about 35% less average predicted total spending than those who weren't continually insured.
Dive Insight:
Even without this study to go on, we all know that going without continuous health insurance can easily lead to health neglect. But with this study in hand, we should now have a new policy objective which explicitly deals with this issue. Where's the biggest problem? As I've noted elsewhere, aging members of America's middle class are not going to get their insurance from the ACA, as policies are just too expensive and they're not eligible for subsidies. But clearly, there's a lot of money to be saved in seeing to it that millions of middle-class uninsureds have coverage prior to Medicare. OK, who's going to take this one on?