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...

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...

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...

Previous research suggests that restricting the availability of abortion reduces average birth weight by increasing the number of unhealthy fetuses that are carried to term. In this paper we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to ask whether restrictions on Medicaid funding...

Of the ten million uninsured children in 1996, nearly half were eligible for Medicaid, the public health insurance program for poor families, but not enrolled. In response, policy efforts to improve coverage have shifted to increasing Medicaid take-up among those already eligible rather than...

In 1966, Southern hospitals were barred from participating in Medicare unless they discontinued their long-standing practice of racial segregation. Using data from five Deep South states and exploiting county-level variation in Medicare certification dates, we find that gaining access to an...

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...

We study how men's dependence on their own employer for health insurance affects labor supply responses and loss of health insurance coverage when faced with a serious health shock. Men with employment-contingent health insurance (ECHI) are more likely to remain working following some kinds of...

Most existing work on the price elasticity of demand for health insurance focuses on employees' decisions to enroll in employer-provided plans. Yet any attempt to achieve universal coverage must focus on the uninsured, the vast majority of whom are not offered employer-sponsored insurance. In...

We study the health insurance and labor market implications of the recent Affordable Care Act (ACA) provision that allows dependents to remain on parental policies until age 26 using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Our comparison of outcomes for young adults aged...