The first part of the article is about all the factors they tried to use to explain why debt is higher in the south and how the obvious things they looked at first didn't account for the differences. The four paragraphs here get to the meat of the why. Refusal to expand Medicaid. Freeeeeeeeedumb!!!
Analysis | Why Does The South Have Such Ugly Credit Scores? - WorldNewsEra
A clue to the broader answer comes from a recent analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that medical debt “became more concentrated in lower-income communities in states that did not expand Medicaid” after key provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014.
To reach that conclusion, Raymond Kluender of Harvard Business School, Neale Mahoney of Stanford University, Francis Wong of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Wesley Yin of the University of California at Los Angeles looked at detailed credit-report data from 2009 to 2020. (Mahoney is currently on leave to serve on President Biden’s National Economic Council.)
Of the 11 states that have yet to expand Medicaid, eight sit in the South, according to KFF, a San Francisco health-policy nonprofit. Southerners were more likely to be behind on medical debt even before the ACA, but the reluctance among the region’s mostly Republican governors to participate in the Medicaid expansion has increased the gaps between the South and the rest of the country.
In states that immediately expanded Medicaid, medical debt was slashed nearly in half between 2013 and 2020. In states that didn’t expand Medicaid, medical debt fell just 10 percent, the JAMA team found. And in low-income communities in those states, debt levels actually rose.
Analysis | Why Does The South Have Such Ugly Credit Scores? - WorldNewsEra
A clue to the broader answer comes from a recent analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that medical debt “became more concentrated in lower-income communities in states that did not expand Medicaid” after key provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014.
To reach that conclusion, Raymond Kluender of Harvard Business School, Neale Mahoney of Stanford University, Francis Wong of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Wesley Yin of the University of California at Los Angeles looked at detailed credit-report data from 2009 to 2020. (Mahoney is currently on leave to serve on President Biden’s National Economic Council.)
Of the 11 states that have yet to expand Medicaid, eight sit in the South, according to KFF, a San Francisco health-policy nonprofit. Southerners were more likely to be behind on medical debt even before the ACA, but the reluctance among the region’s mostly Republican governors to participate in the Medicaid expansion has increased the gaps between the South and the rest of the country.
In states that immediately expanded Medicaid, medical debt was slashed nearly in half between 2013 and 2020. In states that didn’t expand Medicaid, medical debt fell just 10 percent, the JAMA team found. And in low-income communities in those states, debt levels actually rose.
