Response to Bret Bicoy's article, "Understanding Moral Hazard"
In Bret Bicoy's April 5th article, he wrote that free prenatal care has a moral hazard, that of "encouraging teenage pregnancy". This would probably be an ex ante moral hazard because it would be affecting behavior before-the-fact. Perhaps it would be ex post if it was expected that, without free prenatal care, unmarried pregnant mothers would get married prior to birth in order to receive spousal health insurance.
I hadn't heard of this, and thought I should search around on the internet to see if it was really true. This is what I found.
Three researchers in 1998 found that that expansions in Medicaid eligibility were associated with a rise in fertility for white, but not black women, and also an overall decrease in abortions. They also found an increase in births to unmarried women and a decrease in teenagers having abortions.
Some researchers found in 2007 and again in 2011 that there was "no robust relationship between Medicaid expansions and fertility".
In 2010, two other researchers looked at it and found that "The results thus do not provide definitive evidence that expansions in public health insurance eligibility have sizable effects on women’s fertility."
In 2014, three other researchers found that the Affordable Care Act reduced unwed pregnancy by a small amount, but it wasn't statistically significant.
In 2018, Barton Willage found that the Affordable Care Act increased sexually transmitted infections and decreased fertility.
In 2018, Melissa Oney found that while the Affordable Care Act was associated with increased rates of sexually transmitted infections, this could be due to "pent up demand" and there wasn't evidence that people behaved in a riskier way as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
Yet his article is better than many other newspaper articles dealing with this topic in that he acknowledges the baby. He noted that regardless of intended versus unintended pregnancy, "there’s an innocent baby who did nothing wrong and is now on the way." I was happy to see that.
Other posts related to protecting unborn babies:
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/protecting-unborn-babies