摘要：This article examines a potential unintended consequence of the mandated Medicaid citizenship verification requirements of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act (DRA). We investigate whether or not these new rules led to an increase in the Medicaid exit rate among enrollees using state administrative data from Georgia. We do this by comparing the exit rate for children enrolled in Medicaid whose first coverage recertification occurs just after implementation of the DRA (which we refer to as a “high impact” first recertification) with those whose first recertification occurs just prior (which we refer to as a “low impact” first recertification). Our analysis suggests that children in the high‐impact first recertification group were about 2 percentage points more likely to exit Medicaid than those in the low‐impact group. Furthermore, these additional exits occurred in racial and ethnic groups more likely to be citizens than noncitizens and prereform estimates suggest that there were very few (roughly 0.10%) noncitizen Medicaid enrollees to begin with. Taken together, our results suggest that the DRA‐enhanced citizenship verification rules led to an increase in Medicaid disenrollment, and thus a reduction in coverage, among citizens. (JEL I18, I38, J13)
