The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on the Near Elderly: Evidence for Health Insurance Coverage and Labor Market Outcomes

Mark Duggan, Gopi Shah Goda, Gina Li

Chapter in NBER book Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 35 (2020), Robert A. Moffitt, editor (p. 179 - 223)
Conference held September 24, 2020
Published in June 2021 by University of Chicago Press
in The Tax Policy and the Economy Series

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) not only changed the landscape of health insurance coverage in the United States, but also affected the relationship between working decisions and health insurance. In this paper, we estimate the impact of the ACA on the near-elderly (ages 60–64) in the five years after the implementation of its key provisions in early 2014. We exploit variation across geographic areas in the pre-existing level of uninsurance and use 65–69 year olds, whose insurance coverage was unaffected by the ACA, as a within-region control group. Our findings indicate that the ACA increased health insurance coverage among the near elderly by 4.5 percentage points and reduced their labor force participation rate by 0.6 percentage points.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1086/713496