The Affordable Care Act and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis

Ruchi Avtar, Rajashri Chakrabarti, Lindsay Meyerson, William Nober and Maxim Pinkovskiy

No 948, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Did Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act affect the course of the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question using a regression discontinuity design for counties near the borders of states that expanded Medicaid with states that did not. Relevant covariates change continuously across the Medicaid expansion frontier. We find that (1) health insurance changes discontinuously at the frontier, (2) COVID-19 testing is discontinuously larger in Medicaid-expanding states, and (3) the fraction of beds occupied in ICUs is discontinuously smaller in Medicaid-expanding states. We also find that (4) COVID- 19 cases and deaths do not change discontinuously at the frontier, with the precision of these estimates being low, but the null result on deaths being general across demographic groups. Finally, we find that (5) smart thermometer readings of fever rates from Kinsa, Inc. do not change discontinuously at the Medicaid expansion frontier.

Keywords: Affordable Care Act; COVID-19; Medicaid; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2020-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: Revised December 2022.
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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