Does Medicare Coverage Improve Cancer Detection and Mortality Outcomes?

Rebecca Mary Myerson, Reginald Tucker-Seeley, Dana Goldman and Darius Lakdawalla

No 26292, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Medicare is a large government health insurance program in the United States which covers about 60 million people. This paper analyzes the effects of Medicare insurance on health for a group of people in urgent need of medical care: people with cancer. We used a regression discontinuity design to assess impacts of near-universal Medicare insurance at age 65 on cancer detection and outcomes, using population-based cancer registries and vital statistics data. Our analysis focused on the three tumor sites for which screening is recommended both before and after age 65: breast, colorectal, and lung cancer. At age 65, cancer detection increased by 72 per 100,000 population among women and 33 per 100,000 population among men; cancer mortality also decreased by 9 per 100,000 population for women but did not significantly change for men. In a placebo check, we found no comparable changes at age 65 in Canada. This study provides the first evidence to our knowledge that near-universal access to Medicare at age 65 is associated with improvements in population-level cancer mortality and provides new evidence on the differences in the impact of health insurance by gender.

JEL-codes: I13 I18 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: AG EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Rebecca M. Myerson, Reginald D. Tucker‐Seeley, Dana P. Goldman, and Darius N. Lakdawalla “Does Medicare Coverage Improve Cancer Detection and Mortality Outcomes?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26292.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Medicare Coverage Improve Cancer Detection and Mortality Outcomes? (2020)
Working Paper: Does Medicare Coverage Improve Cancer Detection and Mortality Outcomes? (2019)
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:26292

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26292

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 ().