 Changing the way the elderly live: Evidence from the home health care market in the United StatesChiara Orsini Journal of Public Economics, 2010, vol. 94, issue 1-2, 142-152 Abstract: I examine how decreases in government coverage of home health care visits to the elderly in the United States have affected their living arrangements. Specifically, I exploit geographic variation in the Medicare Home Health Care reimbursement rate that arose as a result of legislation passed in 1997 and I identify its impact on the living arrangements of older Medicare beneficiaries. I find that less generous reimbursement policies lead to a greater fraction of elderly giving up independent living. Baseline-model estimates suggest that a decline in reimbursement of one visit per user leads to a 0.98% increase in the fraction of elderly Medicare beneficiaries living in shared living arrangements, that is, living with somebody else, rather than alone or with only the spouse. This estimate implies that a decline in reimbursement of 5.1 visits per Medicare beneficiary increases the fraction of elderly that live in shared living arrangements by 1.12 percentage points. Such an increase is consistent with the time-series increase in the fraction of elderly that live in shared living arrangements between 1997 and 2000. Keywords: Home; health; care; Medicare; Living; arrangements; of; the; elderly (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:94:y:2010:i:1-2:p:142-152 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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