How well does the U.S. Government provide health insurance for infants?

Manan Roy

Empirical Economics, 2014, vol. 46, issue 1, 253-284

Abstract: The debate over universal health insurance (HI) in the U.S., as well as the proper role of the government in the HI market, has been quite heated. Fueling this debate is the uncertainty pertaining to the benefits of HI in general, and the relative benefits of private versus public HI in particular. This uncertainty stems from non-random selection into different types of HI (private, public, or none) in combination with the absence of experimental data. Moreover, the lack of typical exclusion restrictions complicates identification of the causal effects of different HI types. Here, the aim is to assess the causal impact of public HI, relative to private HI, on the insured infant’s health. To that end, this study employs the methodology proposed in Altonji et al. (J Polit Econ 113:151–184, 2005 ) which trades off what can be learned in exchange for not requiring an exclusion restriction. Nonetheless, the method remains quite informative in the present context. Specifically, using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Birth Cohort, along with several measures of infant health, the results suggest that while public HI is associated with worse infant health, this association disappears once selection on observables and unobservables is considered. In fact, the estimated effects of public HI are predominantly positive once both types of selection are admitted. Further analysis reveals that the likely beneficial effects of public HI are due to greater coverage for infants at a much lower cost. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Health Insurance; Children; Treatment effects; C21; I12; I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00181-012-0670-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:empeco:v:46:y:2014:i:1:p:253-284

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-012-0670-5

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().