Evaluation of the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act: Analysis of MassachusettsBirths, 1984-1990

摘要

In the report we use data from hospital discharge abstracts to analyze thecharacteristics of all births in Massachusetts for the years 1984, 1986, 1988, and 1990. The paper is divided into four sections. Section II provides background on Massachusetts and on the financing of perinatal care for the poor in the state. Section III then reviews the data we used for our study, with special attention to the limitations of the data and the constraints that result for our analysis. Section IV provides detailed descriptive results, supplemented by simple multivariate analyses that permit some test of the independent effects of such variables as race, income, and payer. In the final section, we summarize our results and offer some concluding remarks on their implications.