Medicaid enrollment opportunities for incarcerated people differ based on the type and availability of enrollment assistance at a correctional facility and the state’s Medicaid expansion status. A 2018 federal law sought to increase Medicaid enrollment among eligible incarcerated people before their release to raise substance use disorder (SUD) treatment rates and lower overdose rates. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin led the first study exploring how the provision of prison-based Medicaid enrollment assistance affected this trend.

The University of Wisconsin study focuses on the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) statewide prison-based Medicaid enrollment assistance program that began in January 2015. The program incorporated Medicaid enrollment assistance into the usual discharge planning process with the assistance of paralegal staff to guide incarcerated adults through the Medicaid enrollment process. In their retrospective cohort study, the researchers examined post-incarceration health care use among 18,265 adults aged 19 to 64 with a history of SUD, who were released from a Wisconsin state prison between April 1, 2014, to December 31, 2016. The researchers relied on person-level data from Wisconsin agencies: the DOC, the Division of Medicaid Services, the State Lab of Hygiene, and the Electronic Data Surveillance System in the Institute for Research on Poverty’s Wisconsin Administrative Data Core. Moreover, the researchers cross-referenced participants’ DOC risks and needs assessment tool, the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), to determine a person’s history of substance use.