The impact of the 2014 Medicaid expansion on the health, health care access, and financial well-being of low-income young adults.

Prior to the 2014 Affordable Care Act (ACA) expansion, 37% of young adults ages 19-25 in the United States were low-income and a third lacked health insurance coverage-both the highest rates for any age group in the population. The ACA's Medicaid eligibility expansion, therefore, would have been significantly beneficial to low-income young adults. This study evaluates the effect of the ACA Medicaid expansion on the health, health care access and utilization, and financial well-being of low-income young adults ages 19-25.

Transitioning to adulthood: Are conventional benchmarks as protective today as they were in the past?

More young adults in the United States are studying beyond high school and working full-time than in the past, yet young adults continue to have high poverty rates as they transition to adulthood. This study uses longitudinal data on two cohorts of young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth to assess whether conventional benchmarks associated with economic success-gaining an education, finding stable employment, and delaying childbirth until after marriage-are as predictive of reduced poverty today as they were in the past. We also explore differences in the protective effect of the benchmarks by race/ethnicity, gender, and poverty status while young.

Experiences of Poverty Around the Time of a Birth: A Research Note.

While research highlights that, on average, women's income and labor force participation fall around the time of a birth, little is known about how women's experiences of poverty around childbirth vary by birth parity or race and ethnicity. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (a comprehensive measure of poverty), this research note examines the poverty rate of mothers overall and by birth parity and racial and ethnic group in the six months before and after childbirth. We also assess the role of current government support programs in moderating financial losses during the time around a birth.

The Intersection of State-Level Immigrant Policy Climates and Medicaid Expansion: an Examination Among Immigrants.

States have broad discretion over the implementation of policies like Medicaid expansion and other policies that impact the well-being and integration of immigrants. While numerous studies document Medicaid expansion on immigrants' health insurance coverage and the role of state immigrant policy climates on immigrants' well-being, no research to date has studied whether the association between a state's Medicaid expansion on immigrants' health insurance coverage varies based on the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of a state's immigrant policy climate. We combine nationally representative data from the 2014-2018 American Community Survey (ACS) with state policy data and estimate multivariate regression models.

The Association Between Legal Status and Poverty Among Immigrants: A Methodological Caution.

Using nationally representative survey data, this research note examines the association between immigrant legal status and poverty in the United States. Our objective is to test whether estimates of this association vary depending on the method used to infer legal status in survey data, focusing on two approaches in particular: (1) inferring legal status using a logical imputation method that ignores the existence of legal-status survey questions (logical approach); and (2) defining legal status based on survey questions about legal status (survey approach). We show that the two methods yield contrasting conclusions.

Health Insurance Coverage: Logical Versus Survey Identification of the Foreign-Born.

Estimating rates of public benefit use for lawful permanent residents (LPRs) is difficult given the limited availability of nationally representative data that disaggregate the foreign-born population by legal status. Using the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation-the only national survey that distinguishes LPRs from other non-citizens-we employ logistic regression to compare estimates of health insurance coverage for legal immigrants using two methods to infer legal status: (1) a logical approach and (2) a survey-based approach. The logical approach, relative to the survey approach, yields a higher predicted probability of having any insurance for LPRs (adjPP = 0.