APPENDIX A: DATA APPENDIX From the paper: THE WAR ON POVERTY’S EXPERIMENT IN PUBLIC MEDICINE: COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS AND THE MORTALITY OF OLDER AMERICANS

Second, we drop grant observations which are listed as “planning grants ” either in the datasets or in the primary source materials. The remaining grants are used to construct the year in which a county first received a CHC program. The ability to cross-check the electronic grant data with primary source materials is essential to assign start dates accurately. Unfortunately, the necessary primary source materials do not exist to do this after 1975, partly because many health centers were funded under the “Rural Health Initiative ” which (only periodically) printed directories. We do observe annual grants to “Community Health Centers, HAS” from 1978-1980 in the National Archives Federal Outlays dataset, but we do not know which of those grants are first grants. Thus, in the analysis with all grantees between 1965 and 1980 we assign later-funded counties a start date of the first grant we actually observe. This could be up to 5 years too late (for centers actually funded in 1975 and not re-funded until 1980), which is why mismeasurement of start dates for this period could contribute to the weaker estimates for the effects of later centers. 2. Mortality Data We construct mortality rates using Multiple Cause of Death (MCD) files (US DHHS 2007) for all years except 1981 and 1982, because the MCD files contain a 50 % sample of deaths for some states in thes