While efforts to improve the health of the uninsured have focused on demand side policies such as increasing insurance coverage, supply side changes may be equally important. Yet there is little direct evidence on the effect of policies designed to increase the supply of Medicaid services to the...

One of the most important public policy issues in the United States is how to improve the life prospects of disadvantaged youth who, in their formative years, face low-quality school systems, poor access to health care, and high-crime environments. The Problems of Disadvantaged Youth includes a...

Two key issues for public insurance policy are the effect of insurance status on medical treatment, and the implications of insurance-induced treat- ment differentials for health outcomes. We address these issues in the context of the treatment of childbirth, using Vital Statistics data on every...

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...

The authors study the effect of public insurance for children on their utilization of medical care and health outcomes by exploiting recent expansions of the Medicaid program to low-income children. These expansions doubled the fraction of children eligible for Medicaid between 1984 and 1992....

The poor health status of children in the U.S. relative to other industrialized nations has motivated recent efforts to extend insurance coverage to underprivileged children. There is little past evidence that extending eligibility for public insurance to previously ineligible groups will...

The authors provide direct evidence on the effect of health insurance on health outcomes by examining the dramatic increases in the eligibility of pregnant women for the Medicaid program between 1979 and 1992. They find that the 30-percentage-point rise in Medicaid eligibility significantly...

I review the key issues that arise in financing health care delivery. I begin by documenting the key features of health care markets that make financing so central in this sector, such as the skewed and unpredictable nature of health care spending and market failures in health care delivery. I...