Medicaid Insurance in Old Age
Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, John Bailey Jones
American Economic Review · 2016 · Volume 106 · Issue 11
Abstract
The old age provisions of the Medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses. We estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime Medicaid transfers and Medicaid valuations across currently single retirees. Compensating variation calculations indicate that current retirees value Medicaid insurance at more than its actuarial cost, but that most would value an expansion of the current Medicaid program at less than its cost. These findings suggest that for current single retirees, the Medicaid program may be of the approximately right size.
Keywords
National Government Expenditures and Health, Health Insurance, Public and Private, Health: Government Policy, Regulation, Public Health, Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Programs, Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs, Economics of the Elderly, Economics of the Handicapped, Non-Labor Market Discrimination
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.