ERIU Funded Research Projects

Author: Levy, Helen
Working Paper: The Economic Consequences of Being Uninsured (PDF) ; October 2002

Abstract:
I estimate the impact of being diagnosed with a serious new health condition (cancer, diabetes, heart attack, chronic lung disease, or stroke) on household wealth, food consumption and total household income for households with and without health insurance at baseline, using data from the first four waves of the Health and Retirement Study. I find that health shocks do not have a significant effect on consumption; households are able to smooth the impact of these shocks. Whether they deplete wealth in order to do so is not entirely clear; the estimated effect of a health shock on wealth is large (about $28,000) for both insured and uninsured households, but is not statistically significant. The proportional effect on wealth is estimated to be larger for uninsured households (a drop of 20 percent) than for insured households (a drop of about 2 percent), but again, neither effect is significantly different from zero. Health shocks reduce household income by about $9,000 and reduce the probability of work by about ten percentage points; the labor supply response to a shock is about the same whether or not a household has insurance. There is no evidence that the uninsured face significantly higher economic risks than the insured in the event of a health shock.

Author: Levy, Helen ; Meltzer, David
Working Paper: What Do We Really Know About Whether Health Insurance Affects Health? (PDF) ; December 2001

Research Highlight 2 (HTML) (PDF) ; March 2003
Q & A with David Meltzer, M.D., Ph.D. (HTML)

Abstract:
It is widely assumed that lack of coverage has deleterious effects on health status. This assumption is based on two important causative relationships: first, that being insured is critically important to receiving appropriate and timely medical care and, second, that receiving appropriate and timely medical care has a significant effect on health status. We analyze the evidence that relates to these assumptions and conclude that, with the exception of a few studies of elderly and child subpopulations, there is little concrete evidence of the existence or magnitude of these causative relationships. This paper is one of six papers commissioned at the outset of ERIU to provide a critical synthesis of the existing literature on who does not have health insurance, why they do not have health insurance, and what difference health insurance makes. The papers appeared in final form in Health Policy and the Uninsured published by Urban Institute Press in 2004.

Author: DeLeire, Thomas ; Levine, Judith ; Levy, Helen
Working Paper: Is Welfare Reform Responsible for Low-Skilled Women’s Declining Health Insurance Coverage in the 1990s? (PDF) ; August 2004

Abstract:
We use data from the 1989-2001 March Supplements to the Current Population Survey to determine whether welfare reform contributed to the declines in health insurance coverage experienced by low-skilled women over this period. During the 1990s, women with less than a high school education experienced a 10.1 percentage point decline in the probability of having health insurance. By contrast, during the same period, women with a high school degree experienced a smaller (3.6 percentage point) decline in health insurance coverage while women with a college education experienced only a very small decline in health insurance coverage. Against this backdrop of large overall declines in health insurance coverage, welfare waivers were associated with a modest, 1.8 percentage point, increase in health insurance coverage for low-skilled women by increasing their probability of having private health insurance, while Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) itself had no statistically significant effect. Overall, welfare reform did not contribute to declines in coverage but rather offset them somewhat. Unfortunately, some groups among low-skilled women did not experience these relative gains in coverage in response to reforms including non-employed women, African- American women, unmarried women, and unmarried women with children. Neither welfare waivers nor TANF were associated with increases in insurance coverage among women with a high school or college education.