Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 31.
(refine search)
Journal Article
Medicaid and the elderly
In 2009, Medicaid spent over $75 billion on 5.3 million elderly beneficiaries. This article describes the Medicaid rules for the elderly and discusses their economic implications.
Newsletter
Medicaid Expansion and the Affordable Care Act: A Fiscal Checkup
On April 4, 2016, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Civic Federation held a conference to examine how states are lowering the ranks of the uninsured under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)?by expanding Medicaid and through other strategies. The conference also looked at the ACA?s impact on delivering health care to traditionally underserved populations.
Working Paper
Does Physician Pay Affect Procedure Choice and Patient Health? Evidence from Medicaid C-section Use
I investigate the relationship between physician pay, C-section use, and infant health, using vital statistics data and newly collected data on Medicaid payments to physicians. First, I confirm past results?when Medicaid pays doctors relatively more for C-sections, they perform them more often. I bolster the causal interpretation of this result by showing that salaried doctors do not respond to this pay differential, and by using a much larger sample of states and years. Second, unlike past work, I look at how changing physician pay affects infant health outcomes. I find that increased ...
Working Paper
Missouri’s Medicaid Contraction and Consumer Financial Outcomes
In July 2005, a set of cuts to Medicaid eligibility and coverage went into effect in the state of Missouri. These cuts resulted in the elimination of the Medical Assistance for Workers with Disabilities program, more stringent eligibility requirements, and less generous Medicaid coverage for those who retained their eligibility. Overall, these cuts removed about 100,000 Missourians from the program and reduced the value of the insurance for the remaining enrollees. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, we show how these cuts increased out-of-pocket medical spending for ...
Working Paper
Closing the Gap: The Impact of the Medicaid Primary Care Rate Increase on Access and Health
The difficulties that Medicaid beneficiaries face accessing medical care are often attributed to the program?s low reimbursement rates relative to other payers. There is little evidence, however, as to the actual effects of Medicaid payment rates for providers on access and health outcomes for beneficiaries. In this paper, we exploit time-series variation in Medicaid reimbursement rates primarily driven by the Medicaid fee bump?a provision of the Affordable Care Act mandating that states raise Medicaid payments to match Medicare rates for primary care visits for 2013 and 2014?to quantify the ...
Working Paper
Old, Frail, and Uninsured: Accounting for Puzzles in the U.S. Long-Term Care Insurance Market
Half of U.S. 50-year-olds will experience a nursing home stay before they die, and one in ten will incur out-of-pocket long-term care expenses in excess of $200,000. Surprisingly, only about 10% of individuals over age 62 have private long-term care insurance (LTCI). This paper proposes a quantitative equilibrium optimal contracting model of the LTCI market that features screening along the extensive margin. Frail and/or poor risk groups are ordered a single contract of no insurance that we refer to as a rejection. According to our model, rejections are the main reason that LTCI take-up rates ...
Working Paper
Losing Public Health Insurance: TennCare Disenrollment and Personal Financial Distress
A main goal of health insurance is to smooth out the financial risk that comes with health shocks and health care. Nevertheless, there has been relatively sparse evidence on how health insurance affects financial outcomes. The few studies that exist focus on the effect of gaining health insurance. This paper explores the effect of losing public health insurance on measures of individual financial well-being. In 2005, the state of Tennessee dropped about 170,000 individuals from Medicaid, resulting in a plausibly exogenous shock to health insurance status. Both across- and within-county ...
Journal Article
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: a review of stimulus spending in New York and New Jersey
The ARRA stimulus package was designed to spur economic and employment growth in response to a deepening U.S. recession and the weakened fiscal conditions of many state governments. An analysis of the local allocation of ARRA funds shows that the $35 billion of stimulus spending in New York was relatively concentrated in expanded funding for Medicaid, while a large share of the $12 billion allocated to New Jersey went to extending unemployment insurance benefits. While ARRA funding supplemented tax revenues in both states in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, the program's spending components are ...
Working Paper
Medicaid's nursing home coverage and asset transfers
Medicaid covers the costs of a long nursing home stay. This coverage may create an incentive for the elderly to transfer their assets to their children in order to qualify for Medicaid before entering a nursing home. Previous researchers had found little evidence that such behavior was widespread or that asset transfers were large. However, data from AHEAD suggest that the self-assessed probability of entering a nursing home is a significant determinant of the likelihood of making an asset transfer. The budgetary implications of these Medicaid-induced asset transfers are probably fairly ...
Working Paper
The effects of welfare reform and related policies on single mothers' welfare use and employment
This paper examines how changes in tax policy, welfare programs, public health insurance, and economic conditions during the 1990s affected welfare use and employment among single mothers. Drawing on panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I give new estimates of the effects of specific policy changes and use those estimates to explain changes in economic behavior. The results suggest that Welfare Reform policies, the EITC, and improved economic conditions, in that order, were the primary determinants of changes in welfare use and employment between 1993 and 1999.