Author: Lincoln H. GrovesPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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.
