Medicaid was primarily designed to protect and insure the poor against medical shocks. Yet, poorer people tend to live shorter lifespans and incur lower medical expenses before death than richer people. Taking these and other important dimensions of heterogeneity into account, and carefully...

"People have heterogenous life expectancies: women live longer than men, rich people live longer than poor people, and healthy people live longer than sick people. People are also subject to heterogenous outof- pocket medical expense risk. We show that all of these dimensions of heterogeneity...