Medicaid and Mortality: New Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data Sarah Miller Norman Johnson Laura R. Wherry NBER Working Paper No. 26081

Issued in July 2019, Revised in August 2020

NBER Program(s):Health Care, Health Economics

We use large-scale federal survey data linked to administrative death records to investigate the relationship between Medicaid enrollment and mortality. Our analysis compares changes in mortality for near-elderly adults in states with and without Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions. We identify adults most likely to benefit using survey information on socioeconomic and citizenship status, and public program participation. We find a 0.132 percentage point decline in annual mortality, a 9.4 percent reduction over the sample mean, associated with Medicaid expansion for this population. The effect is driven by a reduction in disease-related deaths and grows over time. We find no evidence of differential pre-treatment trends in outcomes and no effects among placebo groups.

(574 K) Acknowledgments Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w26081