Estimating The Effects Of Medicaid Eligibility On Teens.pdf

Using a Policy Discontinuity to Estimate the Effects of Medicaid Eligibility" by Bruce D. Meyer and Laura R. Wherry (NBER Working Paper No. 18309, August 2012) investigates the immediate and long-term effects of public health insurance coverage during childhood. Key points include:

- The study exploits a unique feature of early Medicaid expansions that extended eligibility only to children born after September 30, 1983, creating a large discontinuity in lifetime Medicaid eligibility at this birthdate cutoff.
- The authors use this discontinuity to measure the impact of public health insurance on mortality by following cohorts of children born on either side of the cutoff from childhood through early adulthood.
- The analysis focuses on changes in mortality rates by underlying causes of death (internal vs. external) and examines outcomes separately for black and white children.
- Findings indicate that black children were more likely to be affected by Medicaid expansions and gained twice the amount of eligibility as white children.
- The study finds a substantial effect of public health insurance during childhood on the later life mortality of black children aged 15-18, with a 13-20 percent decrease in internal mortality rates for those born after the cutoff.
- No evidence of an improvement in the mortality of white children under the expansions was found.
- The paper is part of the NBER Working Paper Series and was supported by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, among other organizations.