Geographic Variation in ACA-Related Media Messages and Health Insurance Enrollment

Sarah Gollust and Pinar Karaca-Mandic

CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract: The goals of this project were to analyze characteristics of the population exposed to media messages related to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (including television news and advertisements aired by both insurance and political sponsors) during the first open enrollment period of the health insurance marketplace (in October 2013-March 2014) and to assess whether geographic variation in media volume in an individual’s media market of residence is associated with health insurance coverage. Specifically, we estimated individual-level models of insurance coverage to test whether market-level measures of media are associated with the likelihood of a person having health insurance and of having Medicaid coverage, using the 2013-2014 individual ACS files. We found evidence of a significant association, with higher volume of insurance-related ads aired associated with declines in uninsurance in 2014. The study has two specific benefits for Census. By demonstrating the utility of merging media data with Census data to examine insurance outcomes, the project provides a proof of concept that Census data can be used to examine media market-level exposures on Census outcomes (Criterion 3). We also produced estimates of the characteristics of the population of people exposed to media (Criterion 11), answering the policy-relevant research question of whether the volume of media messages was associated with changes in insurance enrollment from 2013 (pre-ACA) to 2014 (post-ACA).

Keywords: ACS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/tn/CES-TN-2020-02.pdf Abstract (application/pdf)
https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/ced/apply-for-access.html?CES-TN-2020-02 First version, 2020 (application/pdf)
CES Technical Notes may contain confidential data and, thereby, disclosure is prohibited. Researchers on approved projects (to apply for access, please see https://www.census.gov/ces/rdcresearch/howtoapply.html) with the correct permissions can request full text notes from CES.Technical.Notes.List@census.gov.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:tnotes:20-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Danielle H. Sandler ().