Medicaid Eligibility Expansion in Florida: Effects On Maternity Care Financing and the Delivery System

expertly constructing the analysis files and Nancy Allen for assistance with Medicaid data. The authors are also grateful to project officers Marilyn Hirsch, Kay Johnson and Herb Silverman for their support. The research upon which this article is based was supported by a coopera-tive agreement from the Health Care Financing Admin-istration and a grant from the March of Dimes Birth De-fects Foundation. Any views expressed herein are the authors ’ and should not be attributed to the Health Care Financing Administration, the March of Dimes Birth De-fects Foundation or RAND. During the past decade, Congress en-acted a series of laws that extendedMedicaid eligibility to many low-in-come pregnant women. These expansions mandated that Medicaid be made available to all pregnant women with an income below 133 % of the federally designated poverty level, and gave states the option to establish higher income thresholds for cov-erage. The expansions also stimulated states to simplify Medicaid eligibility processing, implement outreach programs and intro-duce enhanced prenatal care benefit pro-grams, in an effort to improve low-income women’s access to prenatal care and their birth outcomes and infant’s health. These eligibility expansions were the most important policy changes in the Medicaid program during the 1980s. The expansions led to a significant increase in the number of deliveries financed b