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Title: Saving Babies: The Efficacy and Cost of Recent Expansions of Medicaid Eligibility for Pregnant Women
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Currie, Janet Gruber, Jonathan |
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Saving Babies: The Efficacy and Cost of Recent Expansions of Medicaid Eligibility for Pregnant Women NBER Working Paper No. 4644, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 1994. Also: http://nber.nber.org/papers/W4644 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Keyword(s): Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC); Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Birthweight; Family Structure; Health Reform; Income; Medicaid/Medicare; Modeling; Mortality; Poverty; Pre-natal Care/Exposure; Pre/post Natal Behavior; Pre/post Natal Health Care; Pregnancy and Pregnancy Outcomes This is a revised edition of an ealier working paper, Los Angeles CA: UCLA, December 1993. A key question for health care reform in the U.S. is whether expanded health insurance eligibility will lead to improvements in health outcomes. This question is addressed in the context of dramatic expansions in the Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women that took place during the 1980s. A detailed simulation model of each state's Medicaid policy during the 1979-1990 period is built, and this model is used to estimate 1) the effect of changes in the rules on the eligibility of pregnant women for Medicaid, and 2) the effect of Medicaid eligibility changes on birth outcomes in aggregate *Vital Statistics* data. There are three main findings. First, the expansions did dramatically increase the Medicaid eligibility of pregnant women, but at quite differential rates across the states. Second, the expansions lowered the incidence of infant mortality and low birth weight. Third, changes in Medicaid eligibility, such as relaxations of family structure requirements from the AFDC program, had much larger effects on birth outcomes than broader expansions of eligibility to all women with somewhat higher income levels. |
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Bibliography Citation
Currie, Janet and Jonathan Gruber. "Saving Babies: The Efficacy and Cost of Recent Expansions of Medicaid Eligibility for Pregnant Women." NBER Working Paper No. 4644, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 1994. |