Crowd-out 10 years later: have recent public insurance expansions crowded out private health insurance?
Ten years ago, Cutler and Gruber [Cutler, D., Gruber, J., 1996. Does public health insurance crowdout private insurance? Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, 391-430] suggested that crowd-out might be quite large, but much subsequent research has questioned this conclusion. Our results using improved data and methods clearly show that crowd-out is still significant in the 1996-2002 period. This finding emerges most strongly when we consider family level measures of public insurance eligibility. We also find that recent anti-crowd-out provisions in public expansions may have had the opposite effect, lowering take-up by the uninsured faster than they lower crowd-out of private insurance.
Gruber
Jonathan
J
Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Simon
Kosali
K
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002662:Child Health Services; D002669:Child Welfare; D002675:Child, Preschool; D017047:Cost Sharing; D036262:Empirical Research; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D019458:Insurance Coverage / Q000639:trends*; D007348:Insurance, Health / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008297:Male; D008484:Medicaid; D008875:Middle Aged; D017149:Private Sector / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017150:Public Sector / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D014481:United States