Impacts of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid Expansion on Live Births.

Abstract

We hypothesize that the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid expansion, which extended health insurance coverage to preconception, between-conception, and postconception periods for women meeting income eligibility guidelines, impacted the number of live births in the United States by increasing access to contraception and financial well-being. These impacts may differ by maternal socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Using data from birth certificates aggregated to the state-year level and a difference-in-differences design, we estimated the association between Medicaid expansion and count of live births. We also examined whether associations differed by socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Overall, Medicaid expansion was not meaningfully associated with the count of births (difference-in-differences ß = 0.002; 95% confidence interval [CI] = -0.010, 0.015). However, among certain groups, Medicaid expansion was associated with meaningful changes in the count of live births, though all confidence intervals included the null value. The estimate of the relation between Medicaid expansion and the count of live births was -0.025 (95% CI = -0.052, 0.001) for those ages 18-24 years; -0.078 (95% CI = -0.231, 0.075) for those who were married, and -0.035 (95% CI = -0.104, 0.034) for those who were unmarried. Despite its potential to impact live births, our results indicate that the ACA's Medicaid expansion was not, in general, associated with live births of US residents of reproductive age. However, for younger, married, and unmarried women, the magnitude of estimates supports the hypothesis of a potentially meaningful effect of Medicaid expansions on live births.