More than 18 percent of U.S. adults met the diagnostic criteria for a mental illness. Yet, many who could benefit from mental health care do not receive any treatment, mostly due to the inability to pay for care or lack of health insurance coverage. How does a sudden change in health insurance coverage status affect psychological well-being and mental health? We explore this question using age-based health insurance coverage policies in the United States as natural experiments. We provide evidence that losing health insurance coverage at age 26 due to aging out from dependent coverage is associated with a statistically significant deterioration in certain indicators of mental health among young adults. On the other hand, we find no evidence of an improvement in mental health or psychological well-being among the elderly at age 65 due to becoming eligible for Medicare. These results are robust to potential changes in risk-taking behavior and physical health at the same age cutoffs.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.