Stemming the Tide? The Effect of Expanding Medicaid Eligibility on Health Insurance

Despite considerable research, there is little consensus about the impact of Medicaid eligibility expansions for low-income children. In this paper, I reexamine the expansions' impact on Medicaid take-up and private insurance "crowd-out." Focusing on the most influential estimates of the expansions' impact, I show that while many of the critiques leveled at these estimates have little effect on their magnitude, accounting for age-specific trends in coverage produces estimates similar to others in the literature. Estimating the impact of later expansions using additional years of data, I find low rates of take-up and no evidence of crowding out.