Does Managed Care Hurt Health? Evidence from Medicaid Mothers
利用加州一项强制部分孕妇加入管理式医疗的法律，研究发现管理式医疗降低了产前护理质量，并增加了低出生体重、早产和新生儿死亡的风险。
Most Americans are now in some form of managed care plan that restricts access to services in order to reduce costs. It is difficult to determine whether these restrictions affect health because individuals and firms self-select into managed care. We investigate the effect of managed care using a California law that required some pregnant women on Medicaid to enter managed care. We use a unique longitudinal database of California births in which we observe changes in the regime faced by individual mothers between births. We find that Medicaid managed care reduced the quality of prenatal care and increased low birth weight, prematurity, and neonatal death. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.