Evaluation of Medicaid Expansion on Food Insecurity Amongst Households with a Disability

Food insecurity is disproportionately high amongst households that include someone with a disability. This population is also more likely to incur higher health care expenses related to their disability or secondary diseases. Higher health care expenditures may limit a household’s ability to purchase a sufficient quantity of food, which increases their risk for becoming food insecure. Increased access to free or subsidized health insurance may reduce either current expenditures on health care, or the concern with the potential of incurring high medical bills in the future, either of which may improve a household’s food security status. Therefore, this paper utilizes the expansion of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act as a natural experiment to investigate the relationship between increased access to health care and food insecurity amongst households that include someone with a disability. Data for this project came from the 2011 to 2018 Current Population Survey’s (CPS) Food Security Supplement (FSS). A Fixed Effects Difference and Difference (FE-DD) was used to estimate the effect of Medicaid expansion, which occurred in three different treatment periods 2014, 2015, and 2016. The overall treatment effect estimate is interpreted using the Goodman-Bacon decomposition method. The results from this paper suggests that Medicaid expansion had no significant effect on household food security amongst households with someone with a disability.