To show how the “chilling effect” of welfare reform on Medicaid participation and
health insurance coverage depended on the decisions made by individual states, I pool
the 1994–1995 calendar years of the March CPS to provide a snapshot of the immigrant
and native population prior to welfare reform, and the 1998–2000 calendar years to provide
the respective snapshot after welfare reform. To easily summarize the evidence, I group states into two categories that signal their degree of generosity towards immigrants.
I initially use a definition of the state’s generosity based on the data summarized in the
first two columns of Table 2. A state is classified as “more generous” if it offered at least
one of the programs listed in these two columns; otherwise, the state is classified as “less
generous”. By this definition, 29 states are classified as more generous. Finally, I calculate
health insurance coverage rates in three mutually exclusive groups: natives, citizens, and
non-citizens