Health insurance coverage increases for individuals on probation after ACA implementation
Medical Xpress | April 16, 2019
Over 6 million adults are supervised by the United States correctional system on any given day. Approximately 3.7 million of those adults are on probation and serve their sentences while living in the community. People involved in the correctional system are more likely to have a chronic condition, substance use disorders, or mental illness and are at higher risk of being uninsured when compared with the general population. In the first year after implementation of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) key provisions, health insurance coverage increased for individuals with involvement in the criminal justice system. Whether the ACA continued to improve coverage beyond its first year of implementation among this population was unknown. Researchers from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health recently assessed the impact of the ACA among U.S. adults on probation by estimating insurance coverage for individuals on and not on probation. The findings were recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.