The mortality effects of changing public funding for home health care: An empirical analysis of Medicare home health care in the United States

Abstract

In light of population aging, it is important to understand whether limiting public in‐kind transfers to the elderly affects elderly mortality. I focus on home health care—a popular in‐kind transfer—and I exploit variation in the Medicare home health care reimbursement that arose in 1997 in the United States to study whether cuts to government coverage of home health care affected elderly mortality. Under the identifying assumptions of the DID model, I find that the cuts affected total mortality for some men but not women, suggesting that changes in home health care can affect elderly mortality and differences in mortality between men and women. For men aged between 65 and 74, the Interim Payment System was associated with an increase in mortality equal to 0.6%, an effect in absolute value comparable to the mortality response to a one percentage point change in unemployment rates and within the range of other estimates of the impact of health insurance on elderly mortality.

Traumatic Health Shocks and Spiritual Capital

“…This may be problematic to the extent that exposure to traumatic health events may be non-random. For example, adverse health conditions may be related to economic circumstances of the household (Fox et al 2014;Mock et al 2003), access 3 to quality, affordable medical care (Hadley and Reschovsky 2012;Mays and Smith 2011;Miller et al 2019;Orsini 2019) or job characteristics (Gonzalez-Mule and Cockburn 2017), each of which may also be correlated with religiosity (Guiso et al 2003;Deaton 2009). 5 Thus, an important challenge in estimating the causal impact of health-related trauma is isolating exogenous variation in health events.…”