Extending health coverage to excluded groups may change the health of everyone else who shares the same hospitals and budgets. In 2022, Colombia granted nearly two million Venezuelan migrants access to full health services. We explore the effects of this health care expansion on Colombian mortality rates, comparing municipalities more and less exposed to the program before and after the program’s mass rollout. In a program that covered nearly four percent of the population, we find that a one standard deviation increase in municipal exposure to the program, about 65 newly covered migrants per 1,000 inhabitants, reduced mortality among Colombians by 3.8 percent, with declines of 4.5 percent in infant mortality and 5.6 percent among adults 65 and older. The program averted roughly 6,000 deaths per year, about one life saved annually for every 325 migrants covered. These effects are driven by congestion relief. Newly insured migrants entered financed routine care at scale, tilting the composition of their care sharply away from emergency rooms, while Colombians’ own emergency visits fell and their routine care continued to expand, sustained by the scheduled flow of financial resources for legally covered migrants. Because emergency care was already publicly financed for undocumented migrants, full coverage increased net public spending only modestly. As a result, the net fiscal cost per Colombian life saved is at most USD $63,000, well below conventional benchmarks based on the value of a statistical life. These are benefits for an already insured host population, a channel that is generally omitted from standard fiscal estimates of expanding health coverage to excluded populations.
| Repository name | URI |
|---|---|
| Reproducible Research Repository (World Bank) | https://reproducibility.worldbank.org |
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| Author | Affiliation | |
|---|---|---|
| Sandra V. Rozo | World Bank | sandrarozo@worldbank.org |
| Tatiana Hiller | University of California Davis | Tatiana Hiller |
| Leonardo Peñaloza-Pacheco | Cornell University | ljp96@cornell.edu |
2026-08-24
| Location | Code |
|---|---|
| Colombia | COL |
The materials in the reproducibility packages are distributed as they were prepared by the staff of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this event do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Bank, the Executive Directors of the World Bank, or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the materials included in the reproducibility package.
| Name | URI |
|---|---|
| MIT License | https://opensource.org/license/mit |
| World Bank IGO Rider | https://github.com/worldbank/metadata-editor/blob/main/WB-IGO-RIDER.md |
| Name | Affiliation | |
|---|---|---|
| Sandra V. Rozo | World Bank | sandrarozo@worldbank.org |
| Reproducibility WBG | World Bank | reproducibility@worldbank.org |
| Name | Abbreviation | Affiliation | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reproducibility WBG | DECDI | World Bank - Development Impact Department | Verification and preparation of metadata |
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