Study: Even a small amount for health insurance could make healthy low-income people to drop coverage
Twenty dollars a month might not seem like a lot to pay for health insurance. But for people getting by on $15,000 a year, it's enough to make some drop their coverage - especially if they're healthy, a new study of Medicaid expansion participants in Michigan finds.
That could keep them from getting preventive or timely care, and could leave their insurance company with a sicker pool of patients than before, say the researchers from the University of Michigan and University of Illinois Chicago. They have published their findings as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research, ahead of publication in the American Journal of Health Economics.