Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Refundable Tax Credits For Health Insurance: The Sensitivity Of Simulated Impacts To Assumed Behavior, David W. Emmons, Eva Madly, Stephen A. Woodbury

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We replicate and extend a simulation model developed by Jonathan Gruber with the goals of illuminating Gruber's modeling of health insurance coverage under a tax credit and examining the sensitivity of the results to changes in the model's key parameters. The replications suggest that a refundable tax credit of $1,000 for a single individual or $2,000 for a family for private health insurance would reduce the number of uninsured individuals by between 17.5 and 28 percent and require new government expenditures of between $16.6 and $44 billion, of which about $7.4-$9.7 billion would be for coverage of previously uninsured individuals. …