Who Receives Medicaid in Old Age? Rules and Reality

Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi and Eric French

No 21873, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Medicaid is a government program that provides health insurance to the old who are sick and have little assets and income compared to their medical needs. Thus, it explicitly tests for income, assets, and health or medical needs to determine eligibility. We ask how these rules map into the reality of Medicaid recipiency and what observable characteristics are important to determine who ends up on Medicaid. The data show that both singles and couples with high retirement income can end up on Medicaid at very advanced ages. We find that, conditioning on a large number of observable characteristics, including those that directly relate to Medicaid eligibility criteria, single women are more likely to end up on Medicaid. So are non-whites, but, surprisingly, their higher recipiency is concentrated above the lower income percentiles. We also find that low-income people with a high school diploma or higher are much less likely to end up on Medicaid than their more educated counterparts. All of these effects are large and depend on retirement income in a very non-linear way.

JEL-codes: D1 D31 E21 H2 H31 H4 H51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: AG EH PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published as Margherita Borella & Mariacristina De Nardi & Eric French, 2017. "Who Receives Medicaid in Old Age? Rules and Reality," Fiscal Studies, .

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Related works:
Journal Article: Who Receives Medicaid in Old Age? Rules and Reality (2018)
Working Paper: Who Receives Medicaid in Old Age? Rules and Reality (2017)
Working Paper: Who receives medicaid in old age? Rules and reality (2017)
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