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SALT LAKE CITY — If your insurance coverage depended on it, could you pass a test of basic health knowledge, such as what the numbers in a blood-pressure reading mean, and the difference between being overweight and obese?
Some low-income people in Kentucky may have to, if the state's new requirements for Medicaid survive a lawsuit filed recently.
Kentucky was the first state to obtain the federal government's permission to require many of its Medicaid recipients to work or perform community service in order to receive benefits. People who are unable to work could get around that requirement by taking and passing a course of basic health and financial knowledge, a plan that has been denounced as punitive and cruel by some health-policy analysts.
But proponents of the idea can cite multiple studies that show an association between general knowledge about health and lower health costs, reduced emergency room visits and better patient outcomes.
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