The Impact of Public Health Policy: The Case of Community Health Centers

Fred Goldman and Michael Grossman

No 1020, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of the Community Health Center (CHC) on health levels in the U.S. Using infant mortality as the underlying health indicator, a time series of large counties as the data set, and multivariate regression techniques, we investigate the extent to which the presence of a program in a county affects future mortality. We find that CHCs have negative and statistically significant impacts on white and black infant mortality rates.The centers have larger effects on black infant mortality than on white infant mortality. The reduction in the black infant mortality rate between 1970 and 1978 due to the CHC system amounts to one death per thousand live births or approximately 12 percent of the observed decline.This result is particularly striking in light of the well-known higher infant mortality rate of blacks. A reduction in the excess mortality rate of black babies has been dentfied as a goal of public health policy for a number of years. Our results suggest that community health centers have the potential to make a substantial contribution to the achievement of this goal.

Date: 1982-11
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as Goldman, Fred and Michael Grossman. "The Impact of Public Health Policy: The Case of Community Health Centers," Eastern Economic Journal, Vol. XIV, No. 1, pp. 63-72, (January-March 1988).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1020.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Public Health Policy: The Case of Community Health Centers (1988)
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:nbr:nberwo:1020

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).