Medicaid expansion and the mental health of spousal caregivers

Nilesh Raut, Joan Costa-Font and Courtney Van-Houtven
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Courtney Harold Van Houtven ()

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Health insurance expansions can exert wellbeing effects on individuals who provide informal care to their loved ones, reducing their experience of depression. This study exploits evidence from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion (ACA Medicaid) to examine the effects on the mental wellbeing of informal caregivers. Drawing on an event study and a Difference-in-Differences (DID) design we investigate the policy impact of ACA Medicaid using longitudinal evidence (from the Health and Retirement Study, HRS) for low-income individuals aged 64 or below. We find that ACA Medicaid reduced the likelihood of depressive symptoms among spousal caregivers. We document that exposure to ACA Medicaid gives rise to 8.2% points (on average, equivalent to 30% decrease) reduction in the feeling of depression and 8.7% points increase in the feeling of happiness (on average, 11% increase). The estimates are robust to various specifications, are driven by reductions in out of -pocket expenses and labor supply and, as expected, increased after Medicaid uptake. The evidence from falsification tests confirms that the estimated effects are likely due to ACA Medicaid.

JEL-codes: I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2023-09-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Review of Economics of the Household, 13, September, 2023. ISSN: 1569-5239

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/119977/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Medicaid Expansion and the Mental Health of Spousal Caregivers (2024)
Working Paper: Medicaid Expansion and the Mental Health of Spousal Caregivers (2021)
Working Paper: Medicaid Expansion and the Mental Health of Spousal Caregivers (2021)
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:ehl:lserod:119977

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().