State Approaches to Simplify Medicaid Eligibility and Implications for Inequality of Infant Health.

Along with the late 1980s Medicaid expansion for pregnant women and children, states implemented multiple reforms to reduce administrative burdens and facilitate access to Medicaid and prenatal care. We use National Vital Statistics birth data 1985-1994 and a difference-in-discontinuities approach to compare the effectiveness of these reforms for improving infant health and access to prenatal care. Results indicate that combinations of reforms to reduce administrative burdens increased Medicaid enrollment and improved infant health nearly as much as Medicaid expansion.

The maternal health of American Indian and Alaska Native people: A scoping review.

Indigenous people in the United States experience disadvantage in multiple domains of health. Yet, their maternal health receives limited research attention. With a focus on empirical research findings, we conduct a scoping review to address two questions: 1) what does the literature tell us about the patterns and prevalence of maternal mortality and morbidity of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) people? and 2) how do existing studies explain these patterns? A search of CINAHL, Embase and Medline yielded 4757 English-language articles, with 66 eligible for close review.

Social Spending and Educational Gaps in Infant Health in the United States, 1998-2017.

Recent expansions of child tax, food assistance, and health insurance programs have made American families' need for a robust social safety net highly evident, while researchers and policymakers continue to debate the best way to support families via the welfare state. How much do children-and which children-benefit from social spending? Using the State-by-State Spending on Kids Dataset, linked to National Vital Statistics System birth data from 1998 to 2017, we examine how state-level child spending affects infant health across maternal education groups. We find that social spending has benefits for both low birth weight and preterm birth rates, especially among babies born to mothers with less than a high school education.

Unequal Opportunity Spreaders: Higher COVID-19 Deaths with Later School Closure in the United States.

Mixed evidence on the relationship between school closure and COVID-19 prevalence could reflect focus on large-scale levels of geography, limited ability to address endogeneity, and demographic variation. Using county-level Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 data through June 15, 2020, two matching strategies address potential heterogeneity: nearest geographic neighbor and propensity scores. Within nearest neighboring pairs in different states with different school closure timing, each additional day from a county's first case until state-ordered school closure is related to 1.