TY - JOUR AU - Courtemanche, Charles AU - Marton, James AU - Ukert, Benjamin AU - Yelowitz, Aaron AU - Zapata, Daniela TI - Early Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Health Care Access, Risky Health Behaviors, and Self-Assessed Health JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 23269 PY - 2017 Y2 - March 2017 DO - 10.3386/w23269 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23269 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23269.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Charles J. Courtemanche Department of Economics Gatton College of Business and Economics University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0034 Tel: (859) 323-7990 Fax: (859) 323-1920 E-Mail: courtemanche@uky.edu James Marton Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Department of Economics P.O. Box 3992 Atlanta, GA 30302-3992 Georgia E-Mail: marton@gsu.edu Benjamin D. Ukert Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics University of Pennsylvania 308 Colonial Penn Center 3641 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104-6218 E-Mail: bukert@wharton.upenn.edu Aaron Yelowitz University of Kentucky Department of Economics 335 Business and Economics Building Lexington, KY 40506-0034 Tel: 859/257-7634 Fax: 859/323-1920 E-Mail: aaron@uky.edu Daniela Zapata Impaq International 1101 Vermont Avenue 11th Floor Washington, DC 20005 E-Mail: dzapata@impaqint.com M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2017-04-28 AB - The goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage through a combination of mandates, subsidies, marketplaces, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine the impacts of the ACA on health care access, risky health behaviors, and self-assessed health after two years. We estimate difference-in-difference-in-differences models that exploit variation in treatment intensity from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and pre-ACA uninsured rates. Results suggest that the ACA led to sizeable improvements in access to health care in both Medicaid expansion and non-expansion states, with the gains being larger in expansion states along some dimensions. No statistically significant effects on risky behaviors or self-assessed health emerge for the full sample. However, we find some evidence that the ACA improved self-assessed health among older non-elderly adults, particularly in expansion states. ER -