Health insurance expansions for working families: A comparison of targeting strategies

We compare three eligibility criteria for targeting health insurance expansions in working families: poverty, hourly wages, and employment in a small firm. Making pairwise comparisons among these, we find that targeting by poverty is the most effective and efficient. A poverty-based method is also the most effective way to target those lacking access to employer-sponsored insurance and those with low take-up of such coverage. When we examine the effectiveness of targeting by family type, we find that marital status and number of workers in the family make little difference once we control for the presence of children and for poverty level.