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Health insurance and opioid deaths: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act young adult provision
Author(s) -
Wettstein Gal
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
health economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.55
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1099-1050
pISSN - 1057-9230
DOI - 10.1002/hec.3872
Subject(s) - health insurance , opioid , patient protection and affordable care act , business , health care , medicine , actuarial science , economic growth , economics , receptor
The concurrence of health insurance expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and increasing opioid‐related mortality has led to debate whether insurance increases or decreases opioid deaths. I use the introduction of the ACA young adult (YA) provision as a quasi‐experiment and utilize the resulting policy‐induced variation across states over time in YA access to insurance to study the effect of coverage on opioid‐related mortality. I rely on the share of state populations which stood to gain insurance before the ACA to perform a dose–response analysis, and find that the YA provision reduced opioid‐related mortality. The analysis suggests that 1 percentage point more coverage reduced opioid mortality among YA by 2.5/100,000 or 19.8%.