Time: 2024/08/14, 9:00-10:00 (Beijing Time)

Title:  Public Insurance and the Spread of Infectious Disease

Venue: Zoom

About the speaker:

Alex Hollingsworth is an associate professor at The Ohio State University with joint appointments in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics; the Department of Economics; and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a co-editor at the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and an editor at the Journal of Health Economics. Hollingsworth is an applied microeconomist who examines how regulations affect health with interests in environmental economics, population health, substance abuse, and access to care. His research has been published in economic journals such as American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Human Resources, and science journals such as Environmental Science & Technology and JAMA: Internal Medicine.

Abstract:

We investigate the effect of broadened public health insurance eligibility on the spread of HIV. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we exploit variation in states' decisions to expand their Medicaid programs.  We estimate a 6.4% reduction in the rate of new HIV diagnoses in states which expanded Medicaid relative to those in states that did not. We find that our reductions are primarily driven by young men (aged 25 to 34) and men who have sex with men (MSM), who make up the largest proportion of annual HIV diagnoses in the United States. We estimate differential reductions in HIV diagnosis across subpopulations and explore the role of access to pharmaceutical innovations which mitigate HIV transmission. Our results demonstrate that increased public health insurance access reduced the rate of new HIV diagnoses and a back of the envelope calculation suggests the ACA Medicaid expansions led to cost savings in terms of net HIV prevention and treatment.