Bronchetti and McInerney on Increased Access to Health Insurance Impacting Claims for Workers' Compensation

Paul Secunda of Marquette Law alerted me to an interesting new Upjohn Institute paper today recently posted on the Social Science Research Network authored by Erin Todd Bronchetti (Swarthmore) and Melissa McInerney (Tufts). The paper is titled, "Does Increased Access to Health Insurance Impact Claims for Workers' Compensation? Evidence from Massachusetts Health Care Reform."  From the abstract:

We study over 20 million emergency room (ER) discharges in Massachusetts and three comparison states to estimate the impact of Massachusetts health care reform on claims for Workers’ Compensation (WC). Prior evidence on the relationship between health insurance and WC claiming behavior is mixed. We find that the reform caused a significant decrease in the number of per-capita ER discharges billed to WC. This result is driven by larger decreases in WC discharges for conditions for which there is greater scope to change the payer or the location of care. Conversely, we estimate smaller impacts for weekend versus weekday admissions and for wounds compared to musculoskeletal injuries. Our findings are consistent with the reform lowering WC medical costs for employers/insurers, primarily by inducing injured workers to seek care at less costly sites. The results suggest much smaller impacts on the propensity to bill WC for a given injury. 

The findings appear to lend solid empirical support to anecdotal reports showing reductions in workers' compensation claiming when general access to health insurance is expanded. By implication, one might expect increased workers' compensation claiming when access to health insurance is restricted, but as the authors note, findings in this area have thus far been mixed.

Michael C. Duff