Has U.S. health care for the elderly become more equitable during the past several decades? When inequality is measured by Medicare expenditures, the answer is yes. During 1987-2001, low income households experienced an increase of 78 percent ($2624) in per capita expenditures, double the...

Provider payments are the key determinant of insurance generosity within many health insurance programs covering low-income populations. This paper analyzes the effects of a large, federally-mandated provider payment increase for primary care services provided to low-income elderly and disabled...

Most of the 600,000 adults returning to the community from state and federal prisons annually in the U.S. carry substantial debt, have low income and low education, and limited formal employment prior to entering prison. Upon reentry, they face financial hardship, high rates of morbidity and...

The cost of efforts to expand health insurance coverage to the currently uninsured increases when people who would otherwise purchase private insurance obtain subsidized public coverage. Legislators are increasingly interested in mechanisms that target insurance benefits to those who need them...

Medicaid is one of the most costly welfare programs available to immigrants. This paper uses data from the 1989 to 1992 National Health Interview Survey to compare the effects of Medicaid eligibility on public and private health insurance coverage and on the utilization of medical services among...

We examine how a key provision of the Affordable Care Act--the expansion of Medicaid eligibility--affected health insurance coverage, access to care, and labor market transitions of unemployed workers. Comparing trends in states that implemented the Medicaid expansion to those that did not, we...

The expansion of public insurance eligibility that occurred with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions may have spillover effects to other public assistance programs. We explore the impact of the ACA on two large safety net programs: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the...

The objective of this study is to use data from the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs (NS-CSHCN) to test whether Medicaid physician fees are correlated with access to health services and adequacy of insurance coverage among CSHCN. We use a difference-in-differences...

Making a transfer in kind reduces its value to recipients but can improve targeting. We develop an approach to quantifying this tradeoff and apply it to home care. Using randomized experiments by Medicaid, we find that in-kind provision significantly reduces the value of the transfer to...

A substantial portion of the costs associated with, and the value to beneficiaries of, Social Security Disability Insurance is Medicare eligibility. However, the benefits of this eligibility can vary due to differences in state policies on supplemental Medicare coverage, also known as Medigap....