Bitler, Marianne P., Jonah B. Gelbach, and Hilary W. Hoynes. 2005. "Welfare Reform and Health." Journal of Human Resources 40(2): 309-334.

We investigate the impact of welfare reform on health insurance coverage and healthcare utilization of single women aged 20-45, using nationally representative data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. We present estimates from both difference-in-difference models and difference-in-difference-in-difference models (using married women as a comparison group). We find that welfare reform is associated with reductions in health insurance coverage and specific measures of healthcare utilization, as well as an increase in the likelihood of needing care but finding it unaffordable. Overall, effects are somewhat larger for Hispanics compared with blacks and low-educated women.

Marianne P. Bitler is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute and adjunct at the RAND Corporation. Jonah B. Gelbach is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland. Hilary W. Hoynes is an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Davis and a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The authors thank Amy Cox, Janet Currie, Jon Gruber, Steven Haider, Jacob Klerman, Darius Lakdawalla, Peter Mariolis, Doug Miller, Bob Mills, Shino Oba, Sondra Reese, Jeanne Ringel, Lara Shore Sheppard, Steve Stillman, and members of the NBER Summer Institute, the RAND Brown Bag, and attendees at the 2003 annual conference of the RWJ Scholars in Health Policy Program for their helpful comments and/or for information about health insurance data. They also thank Aaron Yelowitz for providing data on Medicaid expansions and Kitt Carpenter for help with the BRFSS. Excellent research assistance was provided by Jared Rodecker and Peter Huckfeldt. Bitler gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute on Aging, and the RAND Corporation. The views and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the RAND Corporation, NIA, or NICHD. Gelbach gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Program. Correspondence to Hoynes at hwhoynes@ucdavis.edu; Gelbach at gelbach@glue.umd.edu; or Bitler at Bitler@ppic.org. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning October 2005 through September 2008 from Hilary Hoynes, Department of Economics, UC Davis, hwhoynes@ucdavis.edu.