DeLeire, Thomas, Judith A. Levine, and Helen Levy. 2006. “Is Welfare Reform Responsible for Low-Skilled Women’s Declining Health Insurance Coverage in the 1990s?” Journal of Human Resources 41(3): 495–528.
We use data from the 1989–2001 March Supplements to the Current Population Survey to determine whether welfare reform contributed to declines in health insurance coverage experienced by low-skilled women. Between 1988 and 2000, women with less than a high school education experienced an 8.0 percentage point decline in the probability of having health insurance. Against this backdrop of large declines, welfare waivers and TANF are associated with modest increases in coverage for low-skilled women of 2.3 and 3.6 percentage points respectively. Overall, our findings suggest that welfare reform did not contribute to declines in coverage but rather offset them somewhat.
Thomas DeLeire is a senior analyst at the Congressional Budget Office and assistant professor of economics at Michigan State University. Judith A. Levine is an assistant professor of social service administration at the University of Chicago. Helen Levy is a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. The authors would like to thank the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured at the University of Michigan for financial support, Vanessa Coca, Melissa Ford Shah, Patrick Wightman, and James Larson for excellent research assistance and Rebecca Blank, Mark Duggan, Catherine McLaughlin, Robert Moffitt, two anonymous reviewers, and seminar participants at the University of Michigan and at Harvard University for helpful comments. The authors especially thank Anna Aizer for generously sharing her SCHIP data and Jonah Gelbach for providing the details of his previous work. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as those of the Congressional Budget Office. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning January 2007 through December 2010 from Thomas DeLeire, Department of Economics, Michigan State University, 110 Marshall-Adams Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, deleire@msu.edu.