American Economic Association

Medicaid provides health insurance for millions of America’s most vulnerable people. In 2015, it covered 40 percent of all children at a cost of roughly $90 billion. Some have worried that this price tag is too high. 

But in a paper in the American Economic Review, author Andrew Goodman-Baconasserts that Medicaid coverage for children has more than paid for itself in the long run.

Goodman-Bacon found that Medicaid eligibility in early childhood reduced mortality and disability and increased employment up to 50 years later. As a result, young children in the 1960s and 1970s, who grew up with Medicaid, became healthier adults who paid more work-related taxes and relied less on welfare. 

— Read on www.aeaweb.org/research/charts/childhood-insurance-medicaid-adult-health

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