Party Politics, Governors, and Healthcare Expenditures: A Regression Discontinuity Design Approach

This study examines the impact of the gubernatorial partisanship on the growth of health care expenditures for the panel data set of 50 U.S. states over the 1991 to 2009 period. Using the parametric regression discontinuity design, I find no partisan effect on the growth of state’s per capita real total personal health care expenditures. However, an analysis of the growth rates of the components of the health care expenditures suggests that there is a causal effect of party affiliation of the governors on “prescription drugs" component. These findings are robust to the inclusion of additional covariates in the parametric approach as well to the use of non-parametric regression discontinuity approach.