Still 'Saving Babies'? The Impact of Child Medicaid Expansions on High School Completion Rates

Still 'Saving Babies'? The Impact of Child Medicaid Expansions on High School Completion Rates PDF Author: Lincoln H. Groves
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The decoupling of child Medicaid from the cash welfare system greatly increased access to public health insurance for low-income children in the United States. In this paper, I show that the federally mandated public health insurance expansions of the late-1980s and early-1990s significantly increased the number of public high school completers in the 2000s. Using the legislated generosity of a state's child Medicaid program as a time-varying, exogenous source of variation in a quasi-experimental design, I find substantively large declines in the dropout rate and, importantly, large increases in traditional 4-year graduation rates. Results for both measures are driven by Hispanic and White students, the two groups experiencing the greatest within-group increases in eligibility due to the decoupling of child Medicaid from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. In addition, I find evidence that increases in the length of childhood years covered (e.g., through age 5 vs. through age 17) leads to greater gains in completion rates. This suggests that public health insurance coverage throughout childhood produces the largest effect.

Still 'Saving Babies'? The Impact of Child Medicaid Expansions on High School Completion Rates

Still 'Saving Babies'? The Impact of Child Medicaid Expansions on High School Completion Rates PDF Author: Lincoln H. Groves
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The decoupling of child Medicaid from the cash welfare system greatly increased access to public health insurance for low-income children in the United States. In this paper, I show that the federally mandated public health insurance expansions of the late-1980s and early-1990s significantly increased the number of public high school completers in the 2000s. Using the legislated generosity of a state's child Medicaid program as a time-varying, exogenous source of variation in a quasi-experimental design, I find substantively large declines in the dropout rate and, importantly, large increases in traditional 4-year graduation rates. Results for both measures are driven by Hispanic and White students, the two groups experiencing the greatest within-group increases in eligibility due to the decoupling of child Medicaid from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. In addition, I find evidence that increases in the length of childhood years covered (e.g., through age 5 vs. through age 17) leads to greater gains in completion rates. This suggests that public health insurance coverage throughout childhood produces the largest effect.

Saving Babies

Saving Babies PDF Author: Janet Currie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicaid
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
A key question for health care reform in the U.S. is whether expanded health insurance eligibility will lead to improvements in health outcomes. We address this question in the context of dramatic expansions in the Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women that took place during the 1980s. We build a detailed simulation model of each state's Medicaid policy during the 1979-1990 period, and use this model to estimate 1) the effect of changes in the rules on the eligibility of pregnant women for Medicaid, and 2) the effect of Medicaid eligibility changes on birth outcomes in aggregate Vital Statistics data. We have three main findings. First, the expansions did dramatically increase the Medicaid eligibility of pregnant women, but did so at quite differential rates across the states. Second, the expansions lowered the incidence of infant mortality and low birthweight; we estimate that the 20 percentage point increase in eligibility among 15-44 year old women was associated with a decrease in infant mortality of 7%. Third, earlier, targeted changes in Medicaid eligibility, such as through relaxations of the family structure requirements from the AFDC program, had much larger effects on birth outcomes than broader expansions of eligibility to all women with somewhat higher income levels. We suggest that the source of this difference was the much lower takeup of Medicaid coverage by individuals who became eligible under the broader expansions. We find that the targeted expansions, which raised Medicaid expenditures by $1.7 million per infant life saved, were in line with conventional.

The Effect of Child Health Insurance Access on Schooling

The Effect of Child Health Insurance Access on Schooling PDF Author: Sarah R. Cohodes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Public health insurance programs comprise a large share of federal and state government expenditure, and these programs are due to be expanded as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Despite a large literature on the effects of these programs on health care utilization and health outcomes, little prior work has examined the long-term effects of these programs and resultant health improvements on important outcomes, such as educational attainment. We contribute to filling this gap in the literature by examining the effects of the public insurance expansions among children in the 1980s and 1990s on their future educational attainment. Our findings indicate that expanding health insurance coverage for low-income children has large effects on high school completion, college attendance and college completion. These estimates are robust to only using federal Medicaid expansions, and they are mostly due to expansions that occur when the children are older (i.e., not newborns). We present suggestive evidence that better health is one of the mechanisms driving our results by showing that Medicaid eligibility when young translated into better teen health. Overall, our results indicate that the long-run benefits of public health insurance are substantial.

The Long-Term Effects of Early Life Medicaid Coverage

The Long-Term Effects of Early Life Medicaid Coverage PDF Author: Sarah Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Although the link between the fetal environment and later life health and achievement is well-established, few studies have evaluated the extent to which public policies aimed at improving fetal health can generate benefits that persist into adulthood. In this study, we evaluate how a rapid expansion of prenatal and child health insurance through the Medicaid program affected adult outcomes of individuals born between 1979 and 1993 who gained access to coverage in utero and as children. We conduct this analysis by exploiting state- and cohort-level variation in the timing and generosity of Medicaid expansions using a simulated eligibility instrumental variables model. We find that cohorts whose mothers gained eligibility for prenatal coverage under Medicaid have lower rates of obesity as adults and fewer hospitalizations related to endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases, and immunity disorders as adults. We also find that the prenatal expansions increased high school graduation rates among affected cohorts. We find effects of public eligibility in other periods of childhood on self-reported health and hospitalizations later in life, but these effects are smaller in magnitude. Our results indicate that expanding Medicaid prenatal coverage had sizeable long-term benefits for the next generation.

Saving Teens

Saving Teens PDF Author: Bruce D. Meyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 75

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Book Description
This paper uses a policy discontinuity to identify the immediate and long-term effects of public health insurance coverage during childhood. Our identification strategy exploits a unique feature of several early Medicaid expansions that extended eligibility only to children born after September 30, 1983. This feature resulted in a large discontinuity in the lifetime years of Medicaid eligibility of children at this birthdate cutoff. Those with family incomes at or just below the poverty line had close to five more years of eligibility if they were born just after the cutoff than if they were born just before. We use this discontinuity in eligibility to measure the impact of public health insurance on mortality by following cohorts of children born on either side of this cutoff from childhood through early adulthood. We examine changes in rates of mortality by the underlying causes of death, distinguishing between deaths due to internal and external causes. We also examine outcomes separately for black and white children. Our analysis shows that black children were more likely to be affected by the Medicaid expansions and gained twice the amount of eligibility as white children. We find a substantial effect of public eligibility during childhood on the later life mortality of black children at ages 15-18. The estimates indicate a 13-18 percent decrease in the internal mortality rate of black teens born after September 30, 1983. We find no evidence of an improvement in the mortality of white children under the expansions.

Evaluating the Effect of Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program Expansions

Evaluating the Effect of Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program Expansions PDF Author: Jason R. Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child health services
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description


A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty

A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309483980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 619

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Book Description
The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.

Saving babies

Saving babies PDF Author: National Bureau of Economic Research
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : es
Pages : 49

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Book Description


The Effect of Medicaid Expansions for Low-income Children on Medicaid Participation and Insurance Coverage

The Effect of Medicaid Expansions for Low-income Children on Medicaid Participation and Insurance Coverage PDF Author: John C. Ham
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 51

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Book Description
Increased availability of public health insurance for children has led to two potentially contradictory concerns for public policy: that expanded availability of public insurance may lead families to decline private insurance and that additional public coverage may not reach many uninsured children. We examine these two concerns using data from the 1987-1993 Surveys of Income and Program Participation. Using static models we find that the expansions resulted in increased Medicaid coverage, although the estimates of take-up are smaller than estimates from previous research. We find little evidence of a negative relationship of any significant magnitude between eligibility for Medicaid and private coverage. We also find that children who have been eligible for Medicaid longer are more likely to be enrolled in Medicaid but no more likely to have lost private coverage. Including individual fixed effects reduces the magnitude of the estimated take-up effect, while the fixed effects estimates for the private insurance regression become negative and marginally statistically significant in some specifications. Simple dynamic models of insurance choice show that insurance choice is quite persistent. The estimated long run impact of eligibility in the dynamic models is larger than the estimate from the static models, while the immediate impact of expanded Medicaid eligibility from the dynamic models is smaller than the estimated effect from the static models

The Effect of Parental Medicaid Expansions on Children'S Health Insurance Coverage

The Effect of Parental Medicaid Expansions on Children'S Health Insurance Coverage PDF Author: Sarah Hamersma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Research on public health insurance expansions has typically focused on those targeted by the expansions; we estimate the spillover effects of parental Medicaid expansions on the insurance coverage of their children. Expanding parental Medicaid eligibility may increase participation by already-eligible, uninsured children by increasing the value of Medicaid enrollment for the entire family. However, parental expansions may also generate crowd out from private coverage. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation during a period of major parental Medicaid expansions, we find substantial effects of the expansions on the Medicaid participation of children, with evidence of crowd out among some subsamples.