Findings from Harvard School of Medicine in the Area of Affordable Care Act Described (The Effects of Household Medical Expenditures on Income…

Managed Care Weekly Digest

Findings from Harvard School of Medicine in the Area of Affordable Care Act Described (The Effects of Household Medical Expenditures on Income Inequality in the United States)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Managed Care Weekly Digest -- Investigators publish new report on Affordable Care Act. According to news reporting out of Boston, Massachusetts, by NewsRx editors, research stated, "To assess the effect of households' outlays for medical expenditures on income inequality and changes since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We analyzed data from the US Current Population Surveys for calendar years 2010 through 2014."

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from the Harvard School of Medicine, "We calculated the Gini index of income inequality before and after subtracting households' medical outlays (including insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs) from income, the financial burden of medical outlays for each income decile, and the number of individuals pushed below poverty by medical outlays. In 2014, the Gini index was 47.84, which rose to 49.21 after medical outlays were subtracted, indicating that medical outlays effectively redistributed about 1.37% of total income from poorer to richer individuals, a slightly smaller redistribution compared with the years before the ACA. Medical outlays reduced the median income of the poorest decile by 47.6% versus 2.7% for the wealthiest decile and pushed 7.013 million individuals into poverty. The way we finance medical care exacerbates income inequality and impoverishes millions of Americans."

According to the news editors, the research concluded: "This regressive financing pattern improved minimally in the wake of the ACA."

For more information on this research see: The Effects of Household Medical Expenditures on Income Inequality in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 2018;108(3):351-354. American Journal of Public Health can be contacted at: Amer Public Health Assoc Inc, 800 I Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001-3710, USA (see also Affordable Care Act).

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting D.U. Himmelstein, Harvard Med Sch, Dept. of Med, Boston, MA, United States. Additional authors for this research include A.S. Christopher, S. Woolhandler and D. McCormick.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304213. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

Keywords for this news article include: Boston, Massachusetts, United States, North and Central America, Health and Medicine, Affordable Care Act, Legal Issues, Harvard School of Medicine.