IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v136y2021i1p1-49..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Health Insurance and Mortality: Experimental Evidence from Taxpayer Outreach

Author

Listed:
  • Jacob Goldin
  • Ithai Z Lurie
  • Janet McCubbin

Abstract

We evaluate a randomized outreach study in which the IRS sent informational letters to 3.9 million households that paid a tax penalty for lacking health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Drawing on administrative data, we study the effect of this intervention on taxpayers’ subsequent health insurance enrollment and mortality. We find the intervention led to increased coverage during the subsequent two years and reduced mortality among middle-aged adults over the same time period. The results provide experimental evidence that health insurance coverage can reduce mortality in the United States.

Suggested Citation

  • Jacob Goldin & Ithai Z Lurie & Janet McCubbin, 2021. "Health Insurance and Mortality: Experimental Evidence from Taxpayer Outreach," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 136(1), pages 1-49.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:136:y:2021:i:1:p:1-49.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjaa029
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    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:oup:qjecon:v:136:y:2021:i:1:p:1-49.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    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.