The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment / Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, Erzo F.P. Luttmer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Finkelstein, Amy.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Hendren, Nathaniel.

Luttmer, Erzo F.P.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21308.

NBER working paper series no. w21308

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Value of Medicaid

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

We develop a set of frameworks for valuing Medicaid and apply them to welfare analysis of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a Medicaid expansion for low-income, uninsured adults that occurred via random assignment. Our baseline estimates of Medicaid's welfare benefit to recipients per dollar of government spending range from about $0.2 to $0.4, depending on the framework, with at least two-fifths - and as much as four-fifths - of the value of Medicaid coming from a transfer component, as opposed to its ability to move resources across states of the world. In addition, we estimate that Medicaid generates a substantial transfer, of about $0.6 per dollar of government spending, to the providers of implicit insurance for the low-income uninsured. The economic incidence of these transfers is critical for assessing the social value of providing Medicaid to low-income adults relative to alternative redistributive policies.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2015.