Working Paper: NBER ID: w13261
Authors: Thomas Buchmueller; Anthony Lo Sasso; Kathleen Wong
Abstract: The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) significantly expanded public insurance eligibility and coverage for children in "working poor" families. Despite this success, it is estimated that over 6 million children who are eligible for public insurance remain uninsured. An important first step for designing strategies to increase enrollment of eligible but uninsured children is to determine how the take-up of public coverage varies within the population. Because of their low rates of insurance coverage and unique enrollment barriers, children of immigrants are an especially important group to consider. We compare the effect of SCHIP eligibility on the insurance coverage of children of foreign-born and native-born parents. In contrast to research on the earlier Medicaid expansions, we find similar take-up rates for the two groups. This suggests that state outreach strategies were not only effective at increasing take-up overall, but were successful in reducing disparities in access to coverage.
Keywords: SCHIP; Insurance Coverage; Immigrant Children; Public Insurance; Health Policy
JEL Codes: I1; I18
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| SCHIP eligibility (I13) | public insurance coverage (native children) (I13) |
| SCHIP eligibility (I13) | public insurance coverage (non-native children) (I13) |
| waiting periods (C41) | public insurance coverage take-up (I13) |
| public insurance eligibility (I13) | private insurance coverage (native children) (I13) |
| public insurance eligibility (I13) | private insurance coverage (non-native children) (I13) |
| misclassification of insurance coverage (G22) | public insurance take-up (G52) |