IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/26-32.html

The Impact of Expanding Public Health Insurance on Safety Net Program Participation: Evidence From the ACA Medicaid Expansion

Author

Listed:
  • Lucie Schmidt
  • Lara Shore-Sheppard
  • Tara Watson

Abstract

We examine spillover effects from the ACA Medicaid expansion to public programs providing cash and food assistance. We consider program participation in contiguous county pairs crossing state borders, where one state took up the Medicaid expansion and the other did not, allowing us to better control for local economic trends that could affect program participation. We find that the Medicaid expansion increased participation in food assistance and one of the cash programs, with impacts mainly due to participation conditional on eligibility, rather than from labor supply responses. Our results demonstrate the potential for spillovers across safety net programs.

Suggested Citation

  • Lucie Schmidt & Lara Shore-Sheppard & Tara Watson, 2026. "The Impact of Expanding Public Health Insurance on Safety Net Program Participation: Evidence From the ACA Medicaid Expansion," Working Papers 26-32, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    • Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:26-32
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2026/adrm/ces/CES-WP-26-32.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2026
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:26-32. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dawn Anderson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.