Norton E C, Kumar V
Department of Health Policy and Administration, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 27599-7400, USA.
Inquiry. 2000 Summer;37(2):173-87.
This study examines the long-run effect of the 1988 Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act (MCCA). Although most of the MCCA provisions were repealed after only one year, remaining in the law today are the provisions that directly affected the ability of married people to live in the community when their spouses were in a nursing home. We use longitudinal data from the National Long-Term Care Survey and exploit the differential effect of the MCCA on single and married people to test for changes in the probability of going to a nursing home, in wealth, and in the probability of living with others. Our study showed that the MCCA did not achieve its desired effect of preventing spousal impoverishment in the aggregate, even when the sample was restricted to those people most likely to be affected.
本研究考察了1988年《医疗保险灾难性保险法案》（MCCA）的长期影响。尽管MCCA的大部分条款仅实施一年后就被废除了，但如今仍保留在法律中的条款直接影响了已婚人士在其配偶入住疗养院时在社区生活的能力。我们使用了来自全国长期护理调查的纵向数据，并利用MCCA对单身人士和已婚人士的不同影响，来测试入住疗养院的概率、财富以及与他人同住概率的变化。我们的研究表明，即使将样本限制在最有可能受到影响的人群中，MCCA总体上也未实现防止配偶贫困的预期效果。
