Panel:
Health Care and Household Finance Among Low-Income Households
(Health)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Health and health care play an important role in the finances of Americans, especially low-income Americans. At the same time, household finances may have important effects on health care consumption. Despite the important interactions between health care and household finance, there is relatively little rigorous empirical work shedding light on this area. Does household liquidity (i.e. cash-on-hand) influence health care consumption? Would universal health insurance coverage improve households' financial well-being? Does health insurance coverage during childhood improve financial well-being later in life? The papers in this panel all aim to answer these important questions and fill gaps in this literature, all applying natural experiments used in other settings to answer questions related to this understudied area.
The first paper focuses on how prescription drug consumption varies around the time of receipt of Social Security checks, finding novel evidence that health care consumption responds to household liquidity.
The second paper focuses on how universal health insurance coverage affects household financial well-being, leveraging the fact that almost all Americans become eligible at age 65.
The third paper focuses on how being eligible for Medicaid during childhood affects participation in social welfare programs later in life, leveraging changes in Medicaid eligibility.
Together, the papers provide important new quasi-experimental evidence on questions that have received relatively little attention previously.
