Insurance Mandates and Mammography

Marianne P. Bitler, Christopher S. Carpenter

NBER Working Paper No. 16669
Issued in January 2011
NBER Program(s):   HC   HE

Recently adopted federal health reform requires insurers to cover mammograms without cost-sharing. We examine similar state insurance mandates that vary substantially in the timing of adoption and in specifying the ages of women eligible for different mammography benefits. In triple differences models we find that mandates requiring coverage of annual mammograms significantly increased past year mammography screenings by about 8 percent, representing over 800,000 additional women screened from 1987-2000. Mandates that explicitly prohibit deductibles are especially effective at increasing screenings among high school dropouts, suggesting that federal health reform is likely to further increase use of screening mammography.

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Acknowledgments

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