Medicaid Expansion and Incidence of Kidney Failure among Nonelderly Adults

Background Low-income individuals without health insurance have limited access to health care. Medicaid expansions may reduce kidney failure incidence by improving access to chronic disease care.

Methods Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we examined the association between Medicaid expansion status under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the kidney failure incidence rate among all nonelderly adults, aged 19–64 years, in the United States, from 2012 through 2018. We compared changes in kidney failure incidence in states that implemented Medicaid expansions with concurrent changes in nonexpansion states during pre-expansion, early postexpansion (years 2 and 3 postexpansion), and later postexpansion (years 4 and 5 postexpansion).

Results The unadjusted kidney failure incidence rate increased in the early years of the study period in both expansion and nonexpansion states before stabilizing. After adjustment for population sociodemographic characteristics, Medicaid expansion status was associated with 2.20 fewer incident cases of kidney failure per million adults per quarter in the early postexpansion period (95% CI, −3.89 to −0.51) compared with nonexpansion status, a 3.07% relative reduction (95% CI, −5.43% to −0.72%). In the later postexpansion period, Medicaid expansion status was not associated with a statistically significant change in kidney failure incidence (−0.56 cases per million per quarter; 95% CI, −2.71 to 1.58) compared with nonexpansion status and the pre-expansion time period.

Conclusions The ACA Medicaid expansion was associated with an initial reduction in kidney failure incidence among the entire, nonelderly, adult population in the United States; but the changes did not persist in the later postexpansion period. Further study is needed to determine the long-term association between Medicaid expansion and changes in kidney failure incidence.