The New York Times reports on a study 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 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:

Half of ObamaCare’s projected coverage gains (16 million out of 32 million U.S. residents) comes from expanding the Medicaid program.