Presenter:

Sharon Long

Authors:

Sharon Long, John Graves, Stephen Zuckerman

Chair: Ted Frech; Discussant: Chris Garmon Mon June 5, 2006 15:30-17:00 Room 226

Lack of health insurance is a persistent problem in the U.S. health care system. Although there is increasing political consensus as to the need for new policies to increase insurance coverage, there is little consensus as to the form such actions should take: either further expansions of public programs or incentives to increase coverage in the private sector. Federal and State efforts to design effective strategies for expanding insurance coverage should build on the current efforts underway in several innovative states. One such state is New York: New York’s Health Care Reform Act of 2000 included a number of coverage expansions, including Family Health Plus for parents of Medicaid-eligible children and subsidies to make health insurance more affordable and available to small employers and their employees, sole proprietors, and working individuals whose employers do not provide health coverage. This paper assesses the effects of New York’s expansion on eligible parents with respect to public coverage, uninsurance, the displacement of private coverage, and health care access and use. A key challenge to evaluating state health reform initiatives is often a lack of state-specific data. As part of this study, we explore the feasibility of using the data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to evaluate New York’s expansion efforts. The NHIS samples from all states and the District of Columbia and, although not designed to provide state-level estimates for all states, provides state-level estimates for the largest states, including New York. For this study, we use data from the 1998-2004 rounds of the NHIS. As a check on our analysis, we compare the estimates of the effects of the New York’s expansion effort on insurance coverage from the NHIS to those obtained using comparable years of the Current Population Survey.