June 16, 2011 10:25AM # NEJM Study: ObamaCare’s Main Coverage Vehicle Makes Kids Wait for Care By [Michael F. Cannon](https://www.cato.org/people/michael-f-cannon) --- SHARE The *New York Times* [reports](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/health/policy/16care.html) on a [study](http://healthpolicyandreform.nejm.org/?p=14707&query=TOC) published in today’s *New England Journal of Medicine*: > Children with Medicaid are far more likely than those with private insurance to be turned away by medical specialists or be made to wait more than a month for an appointment, even for serious medical problems, a new study finds… > > > **Sixty-six percent of those who mentioned Medicaid-CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) were denied appointments, compared with 11 percent who said they had private insurance…** > > > **In 89 clinics that accepted both kinds of patients, the waiting time for callers who said they had Medicaid was an average of 22 days longer.** > > > “It’s very disturbing,” \[study author\] Dr. \[Karen V.\] Rhodes said. “As a mother, if I had a kid who was having seizures or newly diagnosed juvenile diabetes, I would want to get them in right away.”… > > > Another physician not connected with the study…said: “It’s interesting to think you even need a study to prove that. It’s pretty much common knowledge.”… > > > This month, Dr. Rhodes and her colleagues had a similar [study](http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2011/05/19/peds.2011-0011.abstract) published in the journal Pediatrics, finding that **dentists were far less likely to accept children with public insurance than those with private coverage, even for an urgent problem like a broken front tooth. Another study of hers uncovered patients’ difficulties in obtaining psychiatric care.** Here’s a graph from the study, showing how often kids with private insurance and Medicaid got appointments with various specialists: ![Media Name: 201106_blog_cannon161.jpg](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/wp-content/uploads/201106_blog_cannon161.jpg?itok=mssbbzhz) Half of [ObamaCare](https://www.cato.org/bad-medicine/)’s projected coverage gains (16 million out of 32 million U.S. residents) comes from expanding the Medicaid program. ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).