Abstract

Many low-income immigrants are uninsured yet eligible for public health insurance. In this paper, we examine whether language barriers and network effects can explain disparities in insurance Medicaid participation. Using the 2008 and 2009 American Community Survey, we show that linguistic networks facilitate Medicaid enrollment among non-English speaking adults. Our identification method follows Bertrand et al. (2000) and employs local variation in the density of immigrant populations and nationwide variation in Medicaid participation among ethnic groups. Given a hypothetical policy to increase Medicaid enrollment, for every 1 percentage point of direct increase, networks generate a multiplier effect that boosts participation by an additional 0.26 percentage points. Networks have greatest influence on individuals who are not proficient in English or who arrived in the United States more recently. Our results are robust to alternative specifications, including using an ex ante indicator of group-level participation. We also find that the availability of foreign-language Medicaid information online is associated with significantly higher participation.