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DataWatchAre Adults Benefiting From State Coverage Expansions?
This study provides a rigorous evaluation of state efforts to expand insurance coverage in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Overall, parents in Wisconsin and parents and childless adults in Massachusetts experienced the largest expansions in public coverage, with few, if any, offsetting reductions in private coverage. In contrast, the coverage expansions for parents in California and New Jersey led to increased enrollment, but often at the expense of private coverage. Because constraints on state resources are putting pressure on expansion efforts, we find evidence that cutbacks will place more adults at risk of being uninsured.
UNDER THE STATE CHILDREN'S HEALTH INSURANCE PROGRAM (SCHIP), states have expanded eligibility so that nearly all uninsured children in families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for public coverage.1 As a result, the uninsurance rate for low-income children (defined throughout this paper as having incomes below 200 percent of poverty) had dropped to 17 percent by 2002.2 In contrast, 37 percent of low-income adults were uninsured in 2002.3 Both before and after the implementation of SCHIP, some states were also interested in addressing the coverage problems facing low-income adults. For the most part, states expanded coverage to the parents of children who were already eligible for coverage under Medicaid or SCHIP, but a few states also addressed the needs of childless adults, who are not typically covered by public programs unless they are aged, blind, or disabled. All of this activity has spawned a growing body of literature evaluating the effects of these policy changes on health insurance coverage for adults.4 In this paper we focus on the impacts of recent coverage expansions targeted at adults in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. We provide a rigorous evaluation of efforts to expand insurance coverage to parents in all four states and, in Massachusetts, to childless adults.
Prior to the states efforts to expand coverage, eligibility for public coverage varied (Exhibit 1
The study states also vary in the services provided under their programs, cost-sharing provisions, service delivery, and enrollment methods, among other things. We address the implications of this variation later.
California.
In 2000, California used Section 1931(b) authority to extend eligibility under its Medicaid program (Medi-Cal) to parents with incomes up to 100 percent of poverty (an increase from its prior coverage level of about 74 percent of poverty). The following year, the state extended Medicaid benefits to aged, blind, and disabled people with incomes up to 133 percent of poverty (an increase from 100 percent). Although in 2002 California applied for and received approval of a Section 1115 waiver to expand coverage to the parents of SCHIP children with incomes up to 250 percent of poverty, state budget pressures and a change in administrations halted efforts to implement that expansion. Under Californias coverage expansions, Medicaid eligibility for parents increased from about 15 percent of all parents in the state in 1999 to 21 percent in 2002 (Exhibit 1 New Jersey. Beginning in 2000, New Jersey expanded Medicaid coverage under FamilyCare to parents with incomes up to 200 percent of poverty (an increase from 41 percent) and to childless adults with incomes up to 100 percent of poverty (they were not previously eligible) under a Section 1115 waiver. Unfortunately, the 2001 economic recession, state budget concerns, and rising health care costs lead New Jersey to pull back from its coverage expansions. By the end of 2001, the state had closed enrollment for childless adults. In July 2002, New Jersey closed new enrollment for parents and scaled back medical benefits for childless adults.
Despite the states decision to scaleback its expansions, New Jersey expanded eligibility for parents from 7 percent of all parents in 1999 to 17 percent in 2002 (Exhibit 1
Wisconsin.
Wisconsin expanded coverage to parents with incomes up to 185 percent of poverty (an increase from 51 percent) under a Section 1115 waiver in the second half of 1999. The expansion of coverage under BadgerCare increased the share of parents eligible for coverage from 6 percent of all parents in early 1999 to 24 percent in 2002 (Exhibit 1 Massachusetts. Massachusetts began its effort to expand health care coverage to its entire low-income population in 1997 with the creation of MassHealth, a statewide demonstration project under a Section 1115 waiver. Prior to MassHealth, parents with incomes up to about 86 percent of poverty were eligible for Medicaid coverage, while childless adults were not eligible for any coverage unless they were disabled. Under MassHealth, Medicaid benefits are provided to pregnant women with incomes up to 200 percent of poverty; parents with incomes up to 133 percent of poverty; long-term unemployed adults with incomes up to 133 percent of poverty; unemployed adults receiving unemployment benefits with incomes up to 400 percent of poverty; and all disabled adults, regardless of income. MassHealth provides premium assistance support to parents with incomes of 133200 percent of poverty and childless adults with incomes below 200 percent of poverty who have access to employer-based coverage. And, although not insurance coverage per se, Massachusetts also provides health care through publicly subsidized providers to low-income adults who are not eligible under any of the expansions outlined above. Under MassHealth, the share of parents eligible for insurance coverage (defined as Medicaid benefits or premium assistance support) increased from 9 percent of all nondisabled parents in 1997 to 14 percent in 2002. Over the same period, the share of nondisabled childless adults eligible for coverage rose from zero to 20 percent. In the analysis below, we focus on the effects of Massachusetts expansion efforts for nondisabled parents and childless adults. State coverage changes since 2002. Although this study focuses on the impact of state coverage expansions before 2002, it is worth noting that despite serious state budget shortfalls, California and Wisconsin have maintained the coverage expansions they had implemented by 2002. In Massachusetts, which implemented a much broader set of expansions, state budget difficulties have led the state to curtail eligibility, reduce benefits, and increase cost sharing for some populations since 2002. New Jersey froze new enrollment of childless adults in 2001 and parents in 2002. However, the state received a Health Insurance Flexibility and Accountability (HIFA) waiver in 2003 to enroll up to 12,000 parents with incomes up to 133 percent of poverty who had applied but were not enrolled prior to the states 2002 enrollment freeze.
We present a brief summary of our study methods here. A more detailed description of our methods is provided in an online technical appendix.5 Difference-in-difference approach. We took advantage of the "natural experiments" that occurred in the four study states to compare coverage for adults before and after each state implemented its eligibility expansion. To control for underlying trends in insurance coverage not related to the eligibility expansions, we subtracted changes in health insurance coverage over the same time period for a comparison group of adults who were not affected by the states policy changes. We used these comparison groups in a "difference-in-difference" or comparative change framework.6 Thus, for example, if public coverage increased by ten percentage points in Wisconsin following the expansion of coverage and, over the same time period, increased by six percentage points for the comparison group, the net effect of the expansion would be a gain in public coverage of four percentage points. For California, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, we used 1999 as the pre-expansion period and 2002 as the post-expansion period. For Massachusetts, which implemented its expansion earlier, we used 1997 as the pre-expansion period and combined data from 1999 and 2002 for the post-expansion period. Because there is no perfect comparison group in the absence of random assignment, we drew on several alternate comparison groups to provide the counter-factuals for our analysis. These counterfactuals provide an estimate for what would have happened in each study state if there had been no expansion effort. By using multiple comparison groups, we identified the states where our estimates were sensitive to the particular comparison group chosen (which makes us less confident in the reliability of the results) and the states where our findings were robust across the comparison groups (which increases our confidence in the reliability of the results). The comparison groups for parents in each study state include the following: (1) model 1parents in the same state with incomes just above the income cutoff for public program eligibility (referred to as near-eligible parents); (2) model 2childless adults in the same state with income below the income cutoff for eligibility for parents (referred to as eligible childless adults); and (3) model 3parents in other states who would have been eligible for public coverage under the study states post- expansion eligibility rules if they had lived in that state (referred to as eligible adults).7 The near-eligible-parent group (model 1) allowed us to compare eligible parents with parents in the same state having somewhat higher incomes (and, thus, subject to the same economic and health care environment), while the eligible-childless-adult group (model 2) allowed us to compare eligible parents with other adults in the same state having similar incomes. However, neither in-state comparison group allowed us to compare the low-income parents who are subject to the coverage expansion with a group of low-income parents who are not subject to it. For that comparison, we turned to the cross-state comparison group of parents in other states (model 3). To estimate the impacts of the expansion in coverage to childless adults in Massachusetts, we used variations of model 1 (based on near-eligible childless adults) and model 3 (based on eligible childless adults in comparison states). Selecting states for the cross-state comparison groups. For each study state, we selected a group of comparison states (model 3) that (1) did not implement an expansion in coverage for adults during the study period for that study state (19972002 for Massachusetts and 19992002 for the other three study states); and (2) had levels of Medicaid eligibility and private coverage similar to the study state prior to the study states coverage expansion.8 Because there is wide variation in population characteristics across the states, we used propensity score matching methods to reweight the sample, to ensure that the characteristics of eligible adults in the cross-state comparison groups are similar to those of eligible adults in the study state. Multivariate model specification. We isolated the effects of the state expansions on coverage through difference-in-difference models and multivariate regression methods. The regression models included a rich set of variables to control for differences in the treatment and comparison groups (beyond treatment status) and differences within each group over time that could affect our outcome of interest: health insurance coverage.9 We estimated linear probability models for ease of computation and to facilitate comparisons across alternative models.
The models of insurance coverage included characteristics of the individual, job characteristics, the premium contribution they would likely face to purchase private health insurance, characteristics of their local health care market, and the economic conditions of the local area (Exhibit 2
Crowd-out calculation. We used the estimates from our models to decompose the increase in public coverage into the share attributable to a decline in uninsurance and the share that reflects the "crowding out" of private coverage. A variety of measures have been used to calculate the extent of crowding out and, by extension, its effect on uninsurance.11 We use the most common crowd-out measure: the reduction in private coverage as a result of the expansion divided by the increase in public coverage as a result of the expansion, times 100. This definition focuses solely on changes in private and public coverage that are the result of the coverage expansion. We used a similar calculation that replaces the effect of an expansion on private coverage with the effect on uninsurance to estimate the share of the increase in public coverage that is related to a drop in uninsurance. Crowding out may occur because newly eligible people drop private coverage to enroll in the public program or because people enrolled in the public program stay enrolled even if they get the option of private coverage through, for example, a new employer. It was not possible with the data used in this study to distinguish between these two paths through which crowding out can occur. We tested for whether the share of the increase in public coverage attributable to a decline in uninsurance and the share attributable to the crowding out of private coverage are significantly different from zero. One limitation of our estimates of crowd-out, like those generated by others, is that we cannot assess the extent to which the private coverage that is being replaced by public coverage is "adequate." We return to this point later. Data. The primary source of data for this study was the National Survey of Americas Families (NSAF) for 1997, 1999, and 2002. NSAF, a nationally representative household survey of more than 42,000 families, is uniquely suited for this study because it oversamples low-income households, oversamples families in thirteen focal states (including our study states), and provides data before and after the implementation of the public program expansions. Because of NSAFs complex design, we relied on replication methods to obtain accurate variance estimates of the coefficients in our model and of our estimates of crowd-out. We obtained area characteristics from the Area Resource File (ARF); we calculated county premium data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and County Business Patterns (CBP) data. The outcome measure for our analysis was insurance coverage at the time of the survey. People were assigned to the following hierarchical insurance groups in each year: (1) private coverage (includes coverage from a current or former employer or union or under a military program and insurance purchased by the individual), (2) Medicaid/SCHIP, (3) other (includes coverage not captured elsewhere), and (4) uninsured. Limitations. First, although we used a strong quasi-experimental design and controlled for a wide array of individual and area characteristics in the regression analysis, and although our results were generally consistent across the comparison groups, it is always possible with quasi-experimental methods that unmeasured differences between the treatment and comparison samples may exist that confound the impact estimates. Second, as with all analyses based on survey data, our ability to detect small changes in insurance coverage that result from state coverage expansions was constrained by the sample sizes in the survey.
In all of the study states, public coverage rates increased significantly (Exhibit 3
The different comparison groups generate somewhat different counterfactuals for what would have happened to insurance coverage in each study state in the absence of that states expansion efforts.12 In particular, in all the comparison states we found evidence of smaller changes in coverage. In most instances, public coverage increased, and private coverage decreased by less in the comparison states than in the expansion states.
Exhibit 4
We found strong evidence that the expansion in eligibility for adults resulted in a significant increase in public coverage for both parents and childless adults relative to the changes observed for the comparison groups. The only exception to this finding is when we used the cross-state comparison group for California parents, for whom we found a small positive effect, but one that is not significantly different from zero. We also found that private coverage eroded for parents following the expansion in public coverage beyond that observed in the comparison groups, but those estimates are not always statistically significant. In New Jersey there were significant reductions in private coverage for parents relative to all three comparison groups. In California we found lower rates of private coverage for parents following the expansion of public eligibility based on all the comparison groups; however, the estimates are only significantly different from zero for one comparison group. By contrast, in Massachusetts and Wisconsin the estimates of the change in private coverage following the expansion in public eligibility were relatively small in magnitude and not significantly different from zero relative to any of the comparison groups, which suggests little if any net change in private coverage as a result of the expansion efforts in those states. For childless adults in Massachusetts, the findings are quite different. For that population, both public and private coverage expanded as a result of MassHealth relative to the comparison groups. Given that the key component of MassHealth for nondisabled childless adults is premium assistance for workers with access to employer-sponsored coverage or unemployed workers with access to Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) coverage through a former employer, it is likely that the increase in private coverage we observed under MassHealth reflects the availability of such subsidies.13 Since private coverage increased significantly for childless adults in Massachusetts under MassHealth, there is no crowding out for that population group.
Exhibit 5
We found strong evidence for the crowding out of private coverage by the expansion to parents in New Jersey, where the crowd-out estimates based on all three comparison groups (5995 percent) were significantly greater than zero and, based on one comparison group, could be as high as 100 percent (since the share of the increase in public coverage due to the decline in uninsurance is not significantly different from zero for that comparison group). At the other extreme, we found strong evidence in Wisconsin that the increase in public coverage was largely due to a decline in uninsurance. In that state, the crowd-out estimates (1135 percent) are not significantly different from zero.
The evidence in California and Massachusetts is more mixed, with the estimate of crowd-out from one comparison group in each state significantly greater than zero and the remaining estimates not statistically significant. In California, where the estimates of the declines in uninsurance and private coverage were not generally statistically significant (see Exhibit 4
The conclusion from Exhibit 5
Overall, Wisconsin and Massachusetts have been most successful at reducing uninsurance among adults. In Wisconsin, BadgerCare expanded public coverage rates by double digits above that of the comparison groups, while private coverage held reasonably steady. Similarly, in Massachusetts we observed increases in public coverage for both nondisabled parents and childless adults as a result of MassHealth. However, for childless adults in Massachusetts there was no offsetting reduction in private coverage. In fact, private coverage expanded for this population relative to the comparison groups, likely reflecting the very low incomes of many in that expansion population and the reliance on premium assistance programs for nondisabled childless adults under MassHealth. The coverage expansions in California and New Jersey also led to an increase in public enrollment among the eligible adults, but there was no evidence of a significant reduction in uninsurance in California and limited evidence in New Jersey relative to their respective comparison groups. State policymakers can view these findings as strong evidence that adults in the income groups represented by these eligibility expansions are not reluctant to enroll in public insurance programs. We found no evidence to suggest that there is enough stigma associated with Medicaid or SCHIP to cause adults to pass up the opportunity to enroll. In part, this may be a result of the rebranding of these programs in three of the states we studied (BadgerCare in Wisconsin, FamilyCare in New Jersey, and MassHealth in Massachusetts). California was the exception, but its Medicaid program has been called Medi-Cal since its inception. Our findings also show that policymakers should not assume that they are only enrolling people who would have otherwise been uninsured. Some crowding out of private coverage should be expected, although the degree should not be expected to be uniform across states. While the crowding out of private coverage does increase the direct costs to the public sector, it is likely that at least some share of the private coverage that is replaced by public coverage provides relatively limited benefits or has high premiums, deductibles, and copayments, or both. Crowd-out of inadequate coverage may well yield benefits to families (in terms of better health and financial security) and their communities. Explaining the variations. The lack of uniformity across states may be attributable to a number of factors, and, although we cannot assess the role that each may play, it is important to keep in mind that they can influence our findings and our ability to generalize to other states and other populations. First, variation within and across states in the private health insurance market, the benefits and costs of private coverage, and the benefits and costs of public coverage likely provide different incentives to eligible adults about enrolling in a public program versus opting for a private plan. Second, not all states started from the same initial eligibility standards, and the extent of the state expansions varied. For example, New Jersey and Wisconsin had less generous programs for parents prior to the policy change and bigger expansions than the other two states. Third, the effects of the expansions may be related to specific policies beyond program eligibility. For example, Massachusetts provided premium assistance support rather than direct Medicaid coverage for some expansion populations. New Jersey imposed a waiting period for parents who had employer-sponsored coverage prior to enrolling in FamilyCare, which it waived for parents coming from nongroup or COBRA coverage. This might have allowed some parents to drop employer-sponsored coverage to join the program. Finally, although we approached the methodological challenge of selecting appropriate comparison groups using similar criteria in each state, the objective might not have been met equally well. In that case, some of the variation in effects we observed might simply be the result of the inherent difficulty in evaluating natural experiments. Policy implications. Together, this study and earlier work by Richard Kronick and Todd Gilmer show the effects of public coverage expansions for adults in eight states enacted during the decade preceding the recent state budget crises.14 Insurance coverage expanded in five of the eight states for some or all of the target populations. In the other states, there were either gains in coverage that were not statistically significant or no change that could be measured with the methods used. These findings suggest that when states have the resources to expand public coverage to adults, they have a good chance of being able to reduce their uninsurance rates. During the past few years, state resources have been constrained as a result of the recession. This led a number of states that were leaders in the expansion of health insurance to cut back on their programs. Some states, such as Massachusetts and Washington, made modest cutbacks in eligibility, while others, such as Tennessee, Missouri, and New Jersey, made more extensive program changes. Despite the budget constraints, some states, such as Arizona and Illinois, have continued to expand their public coverage of adults. The ebb and flow in these programs is likely to be inevitable, given the shifts in resources available to states. However, the results of this study show that if public programs are cut, more adults will be at risk of being uninsured and, as a result, at risk of adverse health consequences. This is likely to be increasingly true in the future, as employer-sponsored coverage continues to erode as a result of rising health insurance premiums, cuts in the benefit package, increased cost-sharing requirements, and fewer firms offering coverage.15
Sharon Long (slong{at}ui.urban.org) and Stephen Zuckerman are principal research associates at the Health Policy Center, Urban Institute, in Washington, D.C. John Graves is a research associate there. This research is part of the Assessing the New Federalism Project and received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson, Annie E. Casey, W.K. Kellogg, Henry J. Kaiser Family, Ford, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Charles Stewart Mott, and David and Lucile Packard Foundations, among others.
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