Precipitated by the legislative decision to decouple child Medicaid benefits from welfare receipt, the number of children qualifying for public health insurance grew markedly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, from a baseline of less than 10% of all children in most states at the beginning of the decade to more than 40% of all children in the United States by the time all federal mandates where fully enacted in 1992.  Seeking to bridge the gap in the academic research which examines the impact of Medicaid expansions on health outcomes and studies on early childhood investments and later educational outcomes, this paper explores whether public health insurance expansions to low-income children contributed to an increase in the number of high school graduates in the 2000s. 

Building off of a small yet insightful subset of the academic literature which uses estimates of the generosity of a state’s Medicaid program as a time-varying, exogenous source of variation in a quasi-experimental design, I find a positive and statistically significant relationship between Medicaid eligibility during early childhood – defined from conception through age 5 – and that cohort's graduation rate within a given state.  Modeling is robust to fixed effects and time trends, and intent-to-treat estimates range from a 1.3 to 1.7 percentage point increase in graduation rates for each 10 percentage point increase in years potentially covered during early childhood.  Extending these point estimates to the roughly 25 percentage point increase in generosity witnessed during the expansions of the 1980s and early 1990s reveals an increase of roughly 124,000 to 161,000 grads in 2010, gains which arguably stem from healthier childhoods for low-income children facilitated by Medicaid health insurance expansions.