The United States spends more than $800 billion on Medicare health benefits for adults 65 and older annually, yet little is known about whether the program, first established in 1966, helps Americans live longer lives.
With a new National Institutes of Health (R21) exploratory/research development grant totaling $454,000, Dahai Yue, assistant professor of health policy and management in the University of Maryland School of Public Health will lead a study to fill in knowledge gaps about the federal health insurance that provides coverage for about 20% of the population.
“We hypothesize that having access to Medicare coverage has long-term impact on longevity, especially for individuals with lower socioeconomic status,” said Yue, who is the study’s principal investigator. “Yet we still don’t have all the data needed to understand the impact it has. Each election cycle, politicians always debate whether to expand Medicare, but without the scientific evidence to really know its value. We hope to change that.”
The research team, which includes economists Joseph Price (Brigham Young University), Adriana Lleras-Muney (UCLA), and Andrew Goodman-Bacon (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis), aims to improve estimates of Medicare’s impact on annual mortality and provide the first evidence of its lifetime impact on longevity. They will do this using the largest dataset to date in the US containing information on both individual longevity as well as individual socioeconomic characteristics. The team created this dataset which links the US census (the complete 1940 census data) with genealogical data and includes more than 18 million individuals. They will examine differences between racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups and how much Medicare may reduce lifespan disparities over the long term.
Yue says that the study team’s long-term goal is to provide rigorous evidence for policymakers to craft health insurance expansion policies, improve population health and reduce health disparities.
“Our project goes beyond the current paradigm by examining Medicare’s lifetime effect on longevity and providing evidence on which populations are more likely to benefit from Medicare coverage,” Yue said. “This could improve health and extend lives in the future.”