 Can access to health care mitigate the effects of temperature on mortality?Jamie T. Mullins and Corey White Journal of Public Economics, 2020, vol. 191, issue C Abstract: Understanding the sources of heterogeneity in the health effects of environmental exposure is critical for optimal policy design. Differential access to health care is commonly cited as a potential source of such heterogeneity. We test this hypothesis in a causal framework by combining random year-to-year fluctuations in local temperatures with variation in access to primary care services resulting from the idiosyncratic roll-out of Community Health Centers (CHCs) across US counties in the 1960s and 1970s. We find that the improved access to primary care services provided by CHCs moderates the heat-mortality relationship by 14.2%, but we find little evidence that CHC access mitigates the harmful effects of cold. In a supplementary analysis we find evidence that acute care – in contrast to primary care – may be especially effective at mitigating the cold-mortality relationship. Our results suggest that differential access to health care does contribute to observed heterogeneity in environmental health damages, and that improving access to primary care may be a useful means of mitigating harm from a warming climate. Keywords: Health care; Access; Climate; Temperature; Environment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:191:y:2020:i:c:s0047272720301237 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104259 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier |
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