TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gruber,Jonathan
AU  - Simon,Kosali
TI  - Crowd-Out Ten Years Later: Have Recent Public Insurance Expansions Crowded Out Private Health Insurance?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12858
PY  - 2007
Y2  - January 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12858
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12858.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jonathan Gruber
MIT Department of Economics
E52-355
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-8892
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: gruberj@mit.edu

Kosali I. Simon
School of Public and Environmental Affairs
Indiana University
Rm 359
1315 East Tenth Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-1701
Tel: (812) 856-3850
E-Mail: simonkos@indiana.edu
AB  - The continued interest in public insurance expansions as a means of covering the uninsured highlights the importance of estimates of "crowd-out", or the extent to which such expansions reduce private insurance coverage.  Ten years ago, Cutler and Gruber (1996) suggested that such crowd-out might be quite large, but much subsequent research has questioned this conclusion.  We revisit this issue by using improved data and incorporating the research approaches that have led to varying estimates.  We focus in particular on the public insurance expansions of the 1996-2002 period.  Our results clearly show that crowd-out is significant; the central tendency in our results is a crowd-out rate of about 60%.  This finding emerges most strongly when we consider family-level measures of public insurance eligibility. We also find that recent anti-crowd-out provisions in public expansions may have had the opposite effect, lowering take-up by the uninsured faster than they lower crowd-out of private insurance.
ER  -