Losing Medicaid and Crime
We study the impact of losing health insurance on crime by leveraging one of the most substantial Medicaid disenrollments in U.S. history, which occurred in Tennessee in 2005 and led to 170,000 adults unexpectedly losing coverage. Using police agency-level data and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that this mass insurance loss reduced Medicaid enrollment and increased total crime rates with particularly strong effects for non-violent crime. An analysis of mechanisms suggests that the disenrollment had aggregate effects that extended beyond insurance losses. In particular, we show that the policy shock lead to changes in economic stability, healthcare access and health outcomes, and government spending, all of which could have contributed to the increase in crime we document.
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Copy CitationMonica Deza, Thanh Lu, Johanna Catherine Maclean, and Alberto Ortega, "Losing Medicaid and Crime," NBER Working Paper 32227 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3386/w32227.Download Citation
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Non-Technical Summaries
- In 1993, Tennessee launched TennCare, a program that expanded traditional Medicaid coverage to include low-income adults who were childless...
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