Health Care as Social Insurance: The Role of Medicaid in Improving US Health

Talk by:

Laura Wherry

Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Service, New York University

followed by an informal conversation with:

Anna Harvey

SSRC President

Event Recording

About the Lecture

Expanded access to healthcare in the United States through the nation’s public health insurance program, Medicaid, has led to meaningful–and measurable–improvements in people’s health. Insurance expansions that have targeted pregnant women, children, and adults have all had important short- and longer-term effects on health, and this talk will discuss some of those outcomes and the ways that researchers are exploring and measuring Medicaid’s impact.

About Laura Wherry

Laura Wherry’s primary area of research focuses on the changing role of the Medicaid program and its impact on access to health care and health. Recent work examines the early effects of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions, as well as the longer-term effects of several large expansions in Medicaid targeting low-income pregnant women and children in the 1980s and 1990s. “Multi-generational Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net: Early Life Exposure to Medicaid and the Next Generation’s Health” with Chloe East, Sarah Miller, and Marianne Page, was recently published in the American Economic Review. Prior to joining NYU, Wherry was an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan.