Medicaid provides health insurance to many people who would otherwise face financial barriers to health care, including low-income adults and people with disabilities. In this issue brief, we use data from the 2023 National Health Interview Survey to compare the demographics, health status, and financial barriers for adult Medicaid beneficiaries with adults who have either private insurance or no insurance. We also stratify the results by income to understand how coverage impacts access to care at different income levels, and we examine differences in access and utilization between the disabled and non-disabled adult Medicaid beneficiary population.
The results indicate that there were several differences in access to, use of, and barriers to health care among Medicaid beneficiaries and those with private or no insurance. For example, Medicaid beneficiaries were more likely to have a usual source of care and more likely to have seen a doctor in the past 12 months than adults without insurance. Medicaid beneficiaries were less likely to have encountered financial barriers than uninsured individuals, and more likely to have encountered financial barriers than individuals with private insurance.