| The Kansas Demonstration to Maintain Independence
and Employment (DMIE) provides state Medicaid and other health
and employment support services as wraparound coverage to 200
people with health insurance through the Kansas high-risk pool,
also known as the Kansas Health Insurance Association (KHIA).
People in the high-risk pool experience multiple severe conditions
for which they have been unable to obtain employer-sponsored coverage
or reasonably priced private coverage. They are ineligible for
either Medicaid or Medicare and about one-third of participants
are employed. The goals of the project are to improve the health
and quality of life of individuals in the intervention group and
to demonstrate that, compared to a carefully matched control group
of 200 individuals also in the pool, they maintain a higher rate
of employment and are less likely to become eligible for any form
of Social Security disability benefits or other forms of public
assistance.
University of Kansas staff provide independent, external evaluation
of the project. Measures used for project evaluation include self-reported
demographic and health status, administrative data about health
care use and expenditures from KHIA and the Kansas Medicaid agency,
earnings data from the Kansas Unemployment Insurance Division,
and other data collected through assessments, questionnaires,
surveys, interviews and focus groups. Specific research questions
to be answered include:
- How does self-reported health status and quality of life
change over time for participants in the intervention and control
groups?
- How does access to care and service use for the two groups
change over time?
- How do medical costs for the two groups change over time?
- How does employment change over time for the two groups?
More specifically, how do absenteeism, earnings, and self-reported
levels of job performance change over time in addition to rates
of employment and unemployment?
- Which employment support services are most frequently utilized
and what is their perceived impact by participants?
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