Health Insurance Coverage and Health Care Utilization: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act's Dependent Coverage Mandate

Barış Yörük

No 6277, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) dependent coverage mandate on health insurance coverage rates and health care utilization among young adults. Using data from the Medical Panel Expenditure Survey, I exploit the discontinuity in health insurance coverage rates at age 26, the new dependent coverage age cutoff enforced by the ACA. Under alternative regression discontinuity design models, I find that 2.5% to 5.3% of young adults lose their health insurance coverage once they turn 26. This effect is mainly driven by those who lose their private health insurance plan coverage and those who lose their health insurance plan coverage, whose main holder resides outside of the household. I also find that the discrete change in health insurance coverage rates at age 26 is associated with significant changes in office-based physician and dental visits, but does not have a significant impact on the utilization of outpatient or emergency department services. Furthermore, the effects of the ACA’s dependent coverage mandate on health care spending and out-of-pocket costs are insignificant. These results are robust under alternative model specifications.

Keywords: affordable care act; health insurance coverage; health care utilization; dependent coverage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6277.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Health insurance coverage and health care utilization: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act’s dependent coverage mandate (2018)
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:ces:ceswps:_6277

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().