Differential effect of the state children's health insurance program expansions by children's age.

Research Objective: This paper tests for differences in the effect of State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) on children's insurance coverage and physician visits across three age groups: pre-elementary school-aged children (pre-ESA), ESA children, and post-ESA children.

Data Source: The study uses two cross sections of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) from the 1996 and 2001 panels.

Study Design: A difference-in-differences approach is used to estimate the effect of SCHIP on coverage and physician visits of newly eligible children of different age groups.

Welfare reform and the decline in the health-insurance coverage of children of non-permanent residents.

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act tightened public health-insurance coverage restrictions for non-permanent residents (NPRs) and altered the eligibility of newly permanent residents (PRs). By drawing on data from the SIPP, this paper explores to what extent welfare reform led to a decline in health-insurance coverage for children of NPRs. This paper proposes that the proportion of uninsured children of NPRs with low social economic status (SES) increased by approximately 10 percentage points relative to their PR counterparts.