You know how it goes: You have the great joy of the wedding — or of the gay pride celebrations that followed the Supreme Court’s marriage decision — and then the honeymoon’s over and it’s time to talk about the mundanities of stuff like (sigh) health insurance.
But still, it can be at least quietly pleasing to contemplate the many a newlywed who’ll now qualify for insurance offered by their new spouse’s employer. (And that on top of the several million people whose health insurance subsidies were just saved by the previous Supreme Court decision, on Obamacare.)
Not to rain on the weddings, but it’s also likely that many employers’ “domestic partner” benefits will go away. The picture is complex, but a study just out in JAMA finds that legalizing gay marriage does indeed increase employer-based health insurance coverage for same-sex partners. It looked at New York after gay marriage was legalized there in 2011, and more than 12,000 same-sex couples wed. From the press release:
Compared with men in opposite-sex relationships, same-sex marriage was associated with a 6.3 percentage point increase in ESI [employer-sponsored health insurance] and a 2.2 percentage point reduction in Medicaid coverage for men in same-sex relationships. Same-sex marriage was also associated with an 8.9 percentage point increase in ESI and a 3.9 percentage point reduction in Medicaid coverage for women in same-sex relationships vs women in opposite-sex relationships.
I asked the study’s author, Gilbert Gonzales of the University of Minnesota, whether anyone had done a similar study in Massachusetts after our own pioneering legalization of gay marriage more than a decade ago.
View the original content and more from this author here: http://ift.tt/1JnAY3K
from health IT caucus http://ift.tt/1LFqosm
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment