Medicaid Expansion and Dementia in Nursing Home Admissions

Abstract

This paper examines whether Medicaid expansion following implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) causes an increase in the proportion of people admitted to nursing homes who have Alzheimer’s disease or dementia using a difference-in-differences model and data from the American Community Survey (ACS), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and LTCFocus. This proportion is found to increase by 0.749 percentage points or 2.72 percent in response to Medicaid expansion, based on conditional difference-in-difference estimation with staggered implementation.