Balancing weights for region-level analysis: the effect of Medicaid Expansion on the uninsurance rate among states that did not expand Medicaid

Understand

We predict the average effect of Medicaid expansion on the non-elderly adult uninsurance rate among states that did not expand Medicaid in 2014 as if they had expanded their Medicaid eligibility requirements.

• Using American Community Survey data aggregated to the region level, we estimate this effect by finding weights that approximately reweights the expansion regions to match the covariate distribution of the non-expansion regions.
• Existing methods to estimate balancing weights often assume that the covariates are measured without error and do not account for dependencies in the outcome model.
• Our covariates have random noise that is uncorrelated with the outcome errors and our outcome model has state-level random effects inducing dependence between regions.