Does Medicare Save Lives?
57 Pages Posted: 19 Dec 2007 Last revised: 8 May 2022
Date Written: November 2007
Abstract
The health insurance characteristics of the population changes sharply at age 65 as most people become eligible for Medicare. But do these changes matter for health? We address this question using data on over 400,000 hospital admissions for people who are admitted through the emergency room for "non-deferrable" conditions -- diagnoses with the same daily admission rates on weekends and weekdays. Among this subset of patients there is no discernible rise in the number of admissions at age 65, suggesting that the severity of illness is similar for patients on either side of the Medicare threshold. The insurance characteristics of the two groups are much different, however, with a large jump at 65 in the fraction who have Medicare as their primary insurer, and a reduction in the fraction with no coverage. These changes are associated with significant increases in hospital list chargers, in the number of procedures performed in hospital, and in the rate that patients are transferred to other care units in the hospital. We estimate a nearly 1 percentage point drop in 7-day mortality for patients at age 65, implying that Medicare eligibility reduces the death rate of this severely ill patient group by 20 percent. The mortality gap persists for at least two years following the initial hospital admission.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Regression Discontinuity Designs: A Guide to Practice
By Guido W. Imbens and Thomas Lemieux
-
Regression Discontinuity Designs: A Guide to Practice
By Guido W. Imbens and Thomas Lemieux
-
Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation
-
Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation
-
Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics
By David Lee and Thomas Lemieux
-
Does Head Start Improve Children's Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design
By Jens Ludwig and Douglas L. Miller
-
Does Head Start Improve Children's Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design
By Jens Ludwig and Douglas L. Miller
-
Manipulation of the Running Variable in the Regression Discontinuity Design: A Density Test
-
Remedial Education and Student Achievement: A Regression-Discontinuity Analysis
By Brian Jacob and Lars John Lefgren
-
Regression Discontinuity Inference with Specification Error
By David Lee and David Card