A US study shows the benefits of extending free health care to all Americans, reports Anne Barnard.
Boston: it sounds obvious: People with health insurance get better health care. Medical researchers have struggled for years to precisely measure the health benefits of extending coverage to the uninsured. However, comparisons to people who already have insurance are not conclusive because the insured tend to be wealthier, better-educated, and more likely to be healthy in the first place.
Now, US researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Brigham & Women's Hospital report that they have found a way to answer the question. In a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the researchers found that previously uninsured people who become eligible for the United States' free Medicare system after turning 65 dramatically increase their use of preventive medical services such as mammograms, prostate-cancer screening and cholesterol tests.
The researchers followed a group of 2203 adults who turned 65 - the eligible age for federal Medicare coverage - between 1996 and 2000. Regardless of insurance status, patients in the study increased preventive care visits. But the jump was far greater for the 8 per cent who had no insurance before Medicare.
Before going on Medicare, 41 per cent of the uninsured adults in the study reported getting cholesterol testing. After going on Medicare, 65 per cent of those patients received the testing. Similarly, mammography rates for that group jumped from 46 per cent to 67 per cent and the percentage receiving prostate exams leapt from 29 per cent to 61 per cent.
"We were really surprised at how dramatically Medicare coverage reduces these large disparities between insured and uninsured adults," the lead author Dr Michael McWilliams, a Harvard Medical School graduate and first-year resident at Brigham & Women's, says.
"There's never been any data to show how greatly this vulnerable population could benefit."
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