State Children's Health Insurance Program Participation and Substitution 

Ho Jin Lee and Wei-Hua Tian, University of California

This paper studies the issue of the take-up of public health insurance and the crowd-out of private health insurance after implementing the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997. While there is a substantial literature studying the effects of the income eligibility of Medicaid/SCHIP, little is known about the effects of the various other SCHIP policies on these decisions. This project will extend the current literature by jointly estimating the effects of four different SCHIP policies on the take-up of different health insurance options. These four policies are the income eligibility, cost-sharing, crowd-out, and outreach.