AUTHOR=Guo Hao , Zou Miaomiao 

TITLE=Do non-citizens migrate for welfare benefits? Evidence from the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.955257

DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2022.955257

ISSN=2296-2565

ABSTRACT=We explore if low-educated noncitizens, who have a considerably high uninsured rate, internally migrate to states with more generous public insurance benefits. We utilize state-level variation in accessing Medicaid benefits and employ a difference-in-differences methodology that compares the in-migration and out-migration rates of noncitizens in states that adopted Medicaid expansion, both before and after the policy implementation, to the outcomes of noncitizens in states that did not adopt the expansion. We find that interstate in-migration (out-migration) rates of Medicaid expansion states did not increase (decrease) relative to that of non-expansion states after the expansion.