Medicaid Expansion, Hospital Choice and Health Outcomes: Evidence from a Near-Census of Hospitalizations

We will investigate whether the ACA’s Medicaid expansion has induced consumers to visit different hospitals. To do so, we will exploit the 2014 Medicaid expansion with a difference-in-difference research design, testing whether Medicaid patients became more common in some hospitals rather than others in states that expanded Medicaid versus ones that did not. We will merge patient travel times, hospital characteristics, and hospital rankings into a unique hospital-discharge dataset housed at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This will allow us to test whether consumers visit more-prestigious, larger, or more-conveniently located hospitals once they are insured as a result of the ACA.