Health Insurance Coverage and Academic Skills During Medicaid Expansion in U.S. States, 2009-2019

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 22: The Role of Family, Health, and Parental Engagement in Education and Well-Being

Abstract

Socioeconomic inequalities in academic skills stem largely from children’s disparate out-of-school circumstances and environments. One key factor is children’s health; low-SES children tend to be less healthy than high-SES children, a likely reason why the former have fewer academic skills than the latter. In this study, we ask: How does expanding access to health insurance affect low-SES students’ academic skills? We address this question at the state level using longitudinal data from before and after the adoption of the Affordable Care Act around 2014. Our pooled time-series analyses with fixed effects link changes in rates of child health insurance coverage to changes in fourth-grade reading and math outcomes on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Despite the fact that child coverage already was high before the ACA and increased similarly in states that were and were not impacted by it, our models suggest that boosting child coverage within a state over time (a) raises low-income students’ average score, (b) reduces the proportion of students with less than basic proficiency, and (c) raises the overall mean score – but only for reading, not math. We discuss the implications for contemporary theoretical and political debates surrounding educational inequalities.

Authors

• Dennis J. Condron, Oakland University

• Douglas B. Downey, Ohio State University