Introduction: Medicaid expansion has the potential to increase access to contraception and improve women's health, although existing research examining state-level variation provides mixed evidence. The neighborhood context plays a crucial role in understanding the effects of Medicaid expansion on contraceptive use, as structural inequalities within neighborhoods may shape access to health care and reproductive services.
Materials and methods: We used a unique restricted dataset of 13,224 female respondents ages 15-44 years interviewed in the 2011-2019 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). We merged these data with indicators of state Medicaid expansion status and respondents' neighborhood context, operationalized as Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE) scores. We used quasi-experimental difference-in-differences models to assess if Medicaid expansion impacted provider-dependent contraceptive use and method type differentially by neighborhood-level context. We used multivariable linear probability and multinomial logistic regression models adjusting for individual and community covariates and state/region fixed effects.
Results: Living in a Medicaid expansion state was associated with significant increases in provider-dependent contraceptive method use among respondents in the most deprived neighborhoods (17.9 percentage points, 95% CI [9.0, 26.9], by 2017-2019). Specifically, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) use increased 7.6 percentage points (95% CI [0.6-14.7]) and use of no method or barrier/coital methods declined 17.5 percentage points (95% CI [-26.3, -8.7]) among those in the most deprived neighborhoods by 2017-2019.
Conclusions: Changes in state-level policies can have major impacts on health systems, but the example of Medicaid expansion underscores the differential impacts on people with less access to health resources, such as those living in structurally disadvantaged neighborhoods. Ultimately, further expansion of Medicaid could facilitate access to the full range of contraceptive methods and advance population health equity in additional U.S. states.