Nine years following its passage, research is now coming in on the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Not only has the ACA "...successfully curbed disparities in cancer treatment and allowed many to receive treatment at an earlier stage," but also: "counties in states with expanded Medicaid experienced an average of four fewer deaths from heart disease per 100,000 people than states that didn't accept the expansion under the Affordable Care Act."
Yale and Johns Hopkins University researchers found the following:
Through the Yale study, it was revealed that in states where the ACA was used to expand access to Medicaid, racial disparities in how quickly cancer patients were treated nearly disappeared. The Johns Hopkins research showed that women with ovarian cancer, which is generally difficult to detect and deadly, received diagnoses at an earlier stage after Obamacare went into effect.
Read the article in Newsweek here.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania produced similar findings for heart disease. Researcher Dr. Sameed Khatana said:
"...our study does show that at a population level, expanding Medicaid was associated with a reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease. This was especially prominent in areas with a higher number of residents living in poverty and those areas that had greater increases in insurance coverage."
Read the article at UPI.
These studies reveal that the ACA's goal of making healthcare accessible for more people results in better health and fewer deaths - as well as highlighting the moral imperative of healthcare reform as an insistence on racial, feminist, and socioeconomic parity. Health care is a right, and these studies are more evidence that Everybody In, Nobody Out is the way forward.