This paper reports on the progress that has been made and questions that have been raised about the new Medicare prescription drug benefit that became law in late 2003. The focus is on issues raised during the National Medicare Prescription Drug Congress held in Washington, DC, in February 2004....

Concerns about the health of poor children and mothers produced major changes in the Medicaid public insurance program during the last decade, including expansions in program eligibility and increases in fees paid to physicians who care for covered patients. We examine physician responses to...

The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) expansion of Medicaid in 2014 has improved access to care, but data on its impact on health and mortality is limited. In this study, we use U.S. mortality data from 2011 to 2017 to analyze trends in mortality among adults ages 25-64 before and after Medicaid...

While a large literature examines the immediate and long-run effects of public health insurance, much less is known about the impacts of total program exposure on child developmental outcomes. This paper uses an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the effect of cumulative eligibility gain...

Counties bear large hidden costs for individuals with disabilities who are indigent or homeless. This includes costs for health care, jails and probation in addition to readily identifiable county costs for public assistance. A large share of this cost is health related – costs that the...

This note presents statistics on child Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients whose eligibility had ceased because of a finding of medical improvement in a childhood continuing disability review (CDR) or an age-18 redetermination. We present the numbers and percentage distributions of...

We are the first to document that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) caseworker behavior impacts program receipt, likely due to differing levels of helpfulness in navigating the complicated application process. We use the conditional random assignment of caseworkers as an...