Saving Teens: Using a Policy Discontinuity to Estimate the Effects of Medicaid Eligibility

Abstract

We examine the immediate and longer-term mortality effects of public health insurance eligibility during childhood. Our identification exploits expansions in Medicaid eligibility that applied only to children born after September 30, 1983. This feature resulted in a large discontinuity in the cumulative years of eligibility of children at this birth date cutoff. Under the expansions, black children gained twice the years of Medicaid eligibility as white children. We find a later-life decline in the rate of disease-related mortality for black cohorts born after the cutoff. We find no evidence of a similar mortality improvement for white children.