The Impact of the ACA Medicaid Expansion on Disability Program Applications

Lucie Schmidt, Lara Shore-Sheppard and Tara Watson

No 2019-22, Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College

Abstract: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) expanded the availability of public health insurance, decreasing the relative benefit of participating in disability programs but also lowering the cost of exiting the labor market to apply for disability program benefits. In this paper, we explore the impact of expanded access to Medicaid through the ACA on applications to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) programs. Using the fact that the Supreme Court decision of June 2012 made the Medicaid expansion optional for the states, we compare changes in county-level SSI and SSDI caseloads in contiguous county pairs across a state border. We find no significant effects of the Medicaid expansion on applications or awards to either SSI or SSDI, and can reject economically meaningful impacts of Medicaid expansions on applications to disability programs.

JEL-codes: I10 I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-ias, nep-lab and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/w26192.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to web.williams.edu:443 (SSL connect attempt failed error:0A000152:SSL routines::unsafe legacy renegotiation disabled)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of the ACA Medicaid Expansion on Disability Program Applications (2020)
Working Paper: The Impact of the ACA Medicaid Expansion on Disability Program Applications (2019)
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:wil:wileco:2019-22

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

The price is Free.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College Williamstown, MA 01267. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Greg Phelan ().