The Impact of the State Children\u27s Health Insurance Program on Educational Outcomes in the United States: A Two-Fold Analysis

This paper examines the impact of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) on the educational outcomes of American children as measured by fourth and eighth-grade math and reading standardized test scores from the time of the program’s inception up to the year 2013. More specifically, I focus on the effects of the increases in eligibility for children’s public health insurance coverage brought about by SCHIP on average test scores across the nation at both the state level for all 51 states and the county level for Florida’s 67 counties. On the state level, I am ultimately unable to find evidence of a contemporaneous impact of increases in eligibility on average test scores; however, I discover that in a longer-term sense, cumulative increases in the proportion of life for which the cohorts of students taking the tests have been exposed to SCHIP do appear to lead to statistically significant increases in average fourth and eighth-grade math scores. On the county level, I find that increases in eligibility for SCHIP are associated with significant increases in average fourth and eighth-grade reading and math standardized test scores