After the Affordable Care Act went into effect, doctors in states where Medicaid has been expanded have noticed a
massive increase in diabetes diagnoses:
The number of Medicaid patients with newly identified diabetes surged 23% in states that expanded their programs, an option provided by the law, but there was virtually no increase in states that declined to expand coverage, researchers found.
"Clearly, the expansion of Medicaid has had a tremendous impact," said the study's lead author, Dr. Harvey Kaufman, senior medical director of Quest Diagnostics. "It has helped a lot of people, and frankly helps anyone who pays."
Many of these people put off going to the doctor for treatment of classic diabetes symptoms, afraid they would be faced with crippling medical debt. As millions more have access to basic health care, the numbers of diagnosed diabetics is skyrocketing. And that's a good thing:
"We know from a variety of different studies that if you initiate therapy early, diabetes is easier to treat and you can stabilize the disease," he said. That can head off more serious and costly medical complications later, such as blindness, kidney failure and cardiovascular disease.
NPR recently
tackled the topic as well:
"We've known for a long, long time that a lot of people with Type II diabetes go unrecognized for many years because they don't get screened," Fonseca says. And one of the main reasons they don't get screened, he says, is that they don't have health insurance.
Unfortunately, the states that need Medicaid expansion the most are the ones putting put the biggest fight:
But Ratner points out an irony of the study: Many of the states that did not expand Medicaid are in what he calls the "diabetes belt." It's a region stretching from Louisiana to North Carolina.
"Those states that did not expand Medicaid missed that opportunity and they still have large percentages of people, perhaps as high as 20 percent, living with diabetes who don't know it," he says.
Simply put–early diagnoses saves money and lives. As the
Los Angeles Times notes, Republicans blocking expansion in states
like Missouri are
flat-out wrong:
Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Assn., said it was time to end that debate. "This latest study is a strong health argument against those folks who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act," he said.
Listen to NPR's eye-opening report on the staggering rise of cases
here.