In 2009, Medicaid spent over $75 billion on 5.3 million elderly beneficiaries. This article describes the Medicaid rules for the elderly and discusses their economic implications.

The brief’s key findings are: *Medicaid covers not only the low-income elderly but also those with higher incomes who become impoverished by health costs, such as nursing home care. *The percentage of high-income single retirees receiving Medicaid rises with age – from near zero for those in...

We study the costs and benefits of Medicaid in a model in which retired single people optimally choose consumption, medical spending and saving, while facing uncertainty about their health, lifespan and medical needs. We document Medicaid take-up rates by age, permanent income, and gender in the...

People have heterogenous life expectancies: women live longer than men, rich people live longer than poor people, and healthy people live longer than sick people. People are also subject to heterogenous out-of-pocket medical expense risk. We show that all of these dimensions of heterogeneity are...

Medicaid was primarily designed to protect and insure the poor. However, the poor tend to live much shorter lifespans and thus incur much lower medical expenses before death. In this paper we assess the insurance and redistributive properties of Medicaid, taking these dimensions of heterogeneity...

Medicaid was primarily designed to protect and insure the poor against medical shocks. Yet, poorer people tend to live shorter lifespans and incur lower medical expenses before death than richer people. Taking these and other important dimensions of heterogeneity into account, and carefully...

The old age provisions of the Medicaid program were designed to insure poor retirees against medical expenses. However, it is the rich who are most likely to live long and face expensive medical conditions when very old. We estimate a rich structural model of savings and endogenous medical...