There is increasing interest in expanding Medicare health insurance coverage in the U.S., but it is not clear whether the current program is the right foundation on which to build. Traditional Medicare covers a uniformset of benefits for all income groups and provides more generous access to...

The Affordable Care Act Marketplaces were introduced in 2014 as part of a reform of the U.S. individual health insurance market. While the individual market represents a small slice of the U.S. population, it has historically been the market segment with the lowest rates of take-up and greatest...

Following decades of increasing child access to public health insurance, enrollments fell in many states between 2016 and 2019 and the number of uninsured children increased. This study provides the first national, quantitative assessment of the role of several common types of administrative...

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a widely used program. Previous research shows that WIC improves birth outcomes, but evidence about impacts on children and families is limited. We use a regression discontinuity leveraging an age five when...

The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We suggest that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficiencies and are not likely to facilitate...

Health plans for the poor increasingly limit access to specialty hospitals. We investigate the role of adverse selection in generating this equilibrium among private plans in Medicaid. Studying a network change, we find that covering a top cancer hospital causes severe adverse selection,...

Firearm violence is a pervasive public health crisis in the United States, with significant numbers of homicides involving firearms, including indiscriminate shootings in public spaces. This paper investigates the largely unexplored consequences of stress induced by these attacks on newborn...

Black mothers with unscheduled deliveries are 25 percent more likely to deliver by C-section than non-Hispanic white mothers. The gap is highest for mothers with the lowest risk and is reduced by only four percentage points when controlling for observed medical risk factors, sociodemographic...