Under the War on Poverty, the U.S. experimented with the public provision of health care through the Neighborhood Health Center (NHC) program. NHCs were intended to complement Medicare and Medicaid by reducing nonfinancial barriers to health care and providing more continuous and comprehensive care than traditional hospital out-patient services and charity services. In a related project, we find substantial evidence that NHCs reduced cardiovascular related deaths among those 65 to 84, but
we cannot document the mechanisms for these effects using existing datasets. We request seed money from CEDA to
(1) encode recently discovered OEO surveys of NHC catchment areas in 11 U.S. cities taken before and after NHC began operation;
(2) examine who used NHCs by race, sex, age and insurance and poverty status;
(3) examine how (a) disease burden, (b) health behaviors, (c) insurance status and (d) medical and preventative care availability and (e) medical and preventative care utilization changed in U.S. communities receiving NHCs
(4) examine how changes in (3) relate to changes in the nation as a whole using the Social Inequality Supplement to the 1976 Current Population Survey (or the Health Interview Survey of 1970) and the reweighting approach of DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996)
