Class 24: Medicaid Expansion and Uninsurance

The goal of this module is to understand difference-in-differences as a causal identification strategy. We’ll do this in the context of Medicaid expansion and its effect on uninsurance.

Readings and other links

Links to papers are listed alongside the full reference

• Required readings for this module:
  • Chapters 8-9 of Causal Inference: The Mixtape
  • Chapters 16-18 of The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality
• Supplemental information and readings:
  • Chapter 5 of (Angrist and Pischke 2009)
  • (Courtemanche et al. 2017)
  • (Obama 2016)
    
• Data for this module:
  • Insurance Access and Medicaid Expansion repository

Objectives

• Understand some of the large changes introduced by the Affordable Care Act
• Explain what we mean by “Medicaid expansion”
• Understand the ACS data and how to access the data in R

Activities

• Review homework 4 and RD in practice
• Import ACS data via API in R
• Summarize insurance status over time

References

Angrist, J., and J. Pischke. 2009. Mostly Harmless Econometrics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Courtemanche, Charles, James Marton, Benjamin Ukert, Aaron Yelowitz, and Daniela Zapata. 2017. “Early Impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage in Medicaid Expansion and Non-Expansion States.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 36 (1): 178–210.

Obama, Barack. 2016. “United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps.” Jama 316 (5): 525–32.