Formerly incarcerated adults bear a disproportionate burden of disease, including substance use disorders, mental illness, and HIV, conditions that require timely and ongoing medical care. However, as they reenter the community from correctional facilities, the likelihood of receiving treatment for many chronic conditions declines relative to the incarceration period, and they experience high rates of emergency department use, substance use, and elevated rates of mortality particularly due to drug overdose.
Improved access to health care in the reentry period has the potential to mitigate these relatively high rates of morbidity and mortality. However, historically a key component of access, health insurance coverage, has been largely unavailable to this population. In this publication, HIP Investigator, Dr. Marguerite Burns et al. aimed to estimate the incremental associations between the implementation of expanded Medicaid eligibility and prerelease Medicaid enrollment assistance on Medicaid enrollment for recently incarcerated adults.
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