Studies Conducted at Harvard Medical School on Health and Medicine Recently Published (Access to Care and Outcomes With the Affordable Care Act for Persons With Criminal Legal Involvement): Health and Medicine

2024 SEP 06 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Fresh data on agriculture are presented in a new report. According to news reporting originating from Boston, Massachusetts, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “Importance: By expanding health insurance to millions of people in the US, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) may have important health, economic, and social welfare implications for people with criminal legal involvement-a population with disproportionately high morbidity and mortality rates.”

The news editors obtained a quote from the research from Harvard Medical School: “To scope the literature for studies assessing the association of any provision of the ACA with 5 types of outcomes, including insurance coverage rates, access to care, health outcomes, costs of care, and social welfare outcomes among people with criminal legal involvement. Evidence Review: The literature search included results from PubMed, CINAHL Complete, APA Psycinfo, Embase, Social Science Database, and Web of Science and was conducted to include articles from January 1, 2014, through December 31, 2023. Only original empirical studies were included, but there were no restrictions on study design.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Of the 3538 studies initially identified for potential inclusion, the final sample included 19 studies. These 19 studies differed substantially in their definition of criminal legal involvement and units of analysis. The studies also varied with respect to study design, but difference-in-differences methods were used in 10 of the included studies. With respect to outcomes, 100 unique outcomes were identified across the 19 studies, with at least 1 in all 5 outcome categories determined prior to the literature search. Health insurance coverage and access to care were the most frequently studied outcomes. Results for the other 3 outcome categories were mixed, potentially due to heterogeneous definitions of populations, interventions, and outcomes and to limitations in the availability of individual-level datasets that link incarceration data with health-related data. Conclusions and Relevance: In this scoping review, the ACA was associated with an increase in insurance coverage and a decrease in recidivism rates among people with criminal legal involvement. Future research and data collection are needed to understand more fully health and nonhealth outcomes among people with criminal legal involvement related to the ACA and other health insurance policies-as well as the mechanisms underlying these relationships.”

For more information on this research see: Access to Care and Outcomes With the Affordable Care Act for Persons With Criminal Legal Involvement. JAMA Health Forum, 2024,5(8). The publisher for JAMA Health Forum is American Medical Association (AMA).

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.2640.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Carrie G. Wade, Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Additional authors for this research include James Rene Jolin, Benjamin A. Barsky, Meredith B. Rosenthal.

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)