Who Increases Emergency Department Use? New Insights from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment
This provides incremental insights into healthcare policy by identifying specific subgroups that increase ED use under Medicaid expansion.
The study tackled the problem of understanding heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on emergency department (ED) use, finding that a small group (about 14% of participants) drives the overall increase, with priority groups identified based on demographics and previous utilization.
We provide new insights regarding the headline result that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The individualized treatment effect distribution includes a wide range of negative and positive values, suggesting the average effect masks substantial heterogeneity. A small group-about 14% of participants-in the right tail of the distribution drives the overall effect. We identify priority groups with economically significant increases in ED usage based on demographics and previous utilization. Intensive margin effects are an important driver of increases in ED utilization.