Time: May 25 (Wed.), 10:00 - 11:30 am (Beijing Time)
Title: The Effect of the Partnership Long-Term Care Insurance Program on Private Insurance and Employment
About the Speaker:
Yinan Liu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Applied Economics at the Renmin University of China. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Economics, University of Southern California. She is an applied microeconomist specializing in Health, Labor, and Public Economics. In recent wort, she has explored how individuals respond to changes in government policy surrounding health insurance provision for low-income individuals.
Abstract:
To cover the increasing demand for long-term care (LTC) services in the United States, the Partnership Long-Term Care Insurance Program (PLTC or partnership program) encourages the use of private insurance by allowing its policyholders to sequester an equivalent amount of assets to the value of private LTC insurance benefits from Medicaid asset requirements. This paper employs the stacked Difference-in-Difference-in-Differences (DDD) design to explore the PLTC program's impact on private LTC insurance take-up rates. Using individual information from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) from 2000 to 2014 linked with state-level PLTC program roll-out data, we find that the PLTC program increases private LTC insurance coverage by 7 to 13 percentage points among nearly-elderly individuals (45-62) with relatively adequate assets. We also explore the effect of the PLTC program on employment, which has been rarely investigated in the literature. We show that the program reduces the full-time work rate by 11-20 percentage points and increases the retirement rate by 11-17 percentage points. For near-elderly individuals with relatively low assets, we do not detect a significant policy impact on either private LTC insurance take-up rate or current labor market outcomes. Instead, we find that those who are likely affected by the policy anticipate themselves to work less after the age of 62. To understand this unintended labor market consequence, we investigate heterogeneous policy effects among these low-asset individuals. The policy impact on future work plans is concentrated among high-educated and high-income individuals. Overall, this paper suggests that the PLTC program has shifted individual working patterns for both rich and poor groups, which should be incorporated into the calculus of its cost-effectiveness.
