The Value of Health Insurance during a Crisis: Effects of Medicaid Implementation on Pandemic Influenza Mortality

Karen Clay, Joshua Lewis, Edson Severnini and Xiao Wang
Additional contact information
Xiao Wang: Carnegie Mellon University

No 13200, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper studies how better access to public health insurance affects infant mortality during pandemics. Our analysis combines cross-state variation in mandated eligibility for Medicaid with two influenza pandemics — the 1957-58 "Asian Flu" pandemic and the 1968-69 "Hong Kong Flu" — that arrived shortly before and after the program's introduction. Exploiting heterogeneity in the underlying severity of these two shocks across counties, we find no relationship between Medicaid eligibility and pandemic infant mortality during the 1957-58 outbreak. After Medicaid implementation, we find that better access to insurance in high-eligibility states substantially reduced infant mortality during the 1968-69 pandemic. The reductions in pandemic infant mortality are too large to be attributable solely to new Medicaid recipients, suggesting that the expansion in health insurance coverage mitigated disease transmission among the broader population.

Keywords: medicaid; public health insurance; influenza pandemics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I13 I18 N32 N52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-his, nep-ias and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: Review of Economics and Statistics, 2024, 106 (5), 1393 - 1402

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13200.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Value of Health Insurance during a Crisis: Effects of Medicaid Implementation on Pandemic Influenza Mortality (2024)
Working Paper: The Value of Health Insurance during a Crisis: Effects of Medicaid Implementation on Pandemic Influenza Mortality (2020)
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:iza:izadps:dp13200

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().