I teach an undergraduate health policy class at Duke University. Recently, my students asked me whether states potentially hurt themselves by offering generous health care benefits when neighboring states don’t offer such benefits. Then I got home and pulled out a recent issue of Health Affairs, and read the results of a study suggesting that this problem is, at least in the short term, pretty limited. The researchers looked at four states that had recently expanded their Medicaid programs – Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts and New York. They tested whether low income people from neighboring states moved into these generous states more often than low income people in those generous states moved out – in other words whether in-migration exceeded out-migration…(Read more and view comments at Forbes)
