Navigating Medicaid: Experimental Evidence on Administrative Burden and Coverage Loss

Rebecca Myerson, Allison Espeseth and Laura Dague

No 34191, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study how administrative burden can affect access to safety-net health insurance in a large-scale field experiment of outreach to Medicaid enrollees with an imminent renewal deadline. A pre-recorded call offering assistance increased Medicaid renewal by 1 percentage point (1.5%), including significant effects among tribal members, children, lower-income people, and people with chronic disease. Impacts were larger (21 percentage points) for people who sought assistance. Assuming the intervention could not affect underlying Medicaid eligibility, Medicaid-eligible people account for the findings. These data suggest administrative burden can cause people who are Medicaid eligible and need health care to lose their coverage.

JEL-codes: C93 D73 H75 I13 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
Note: AG CH EH PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34191.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:34191

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34191
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().