Unhealthy Insurance Markets: Search Frictions and the Cost and Quality of Health Insurance (original) (raw)

Insurer Competition and Negotiated Hospital Prices

2013

Bob Town, Mike Whinston, and Ali Yurukoglu) and conference and seminar participants; and from exceptional research assistance from Patricia Foo. We acknowledge support from the NYU Stern Center for Global Economy and Business. All errors are our own. The authors have no other outside sources of funding and no relevant or material outside financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Health insurance and the demand for medical care

Journal of Health Economics, 1983

With rare exceptions the provision of actuarially fair health insurance tends to substantially increase the demand for medical care by redistributing income from the healthy to the sick. This suggests that previous studies which attribute all the extra demand for medical care to moral hazard effects may overestimate the efficiency costs of health insurance.

Health Insurance in the United States: Failure of Private and Multi-Payer Financing

Health Insurance

Since the 1960s, the United States has subscribed to a business model of health care, largely for-profit with most private insurers on a mission to maximize their own revenues. Most insurers use cost sharing through deductibles and copayments based on the principle that enrollees will overuse health care services unless they have enough “skin in the game.” As health care has been corporatized within a medical-industrial complex, even public insurers such as Medicare and Medicaid have been privatized with the same mission. Employer-sponsored health insurance has been the core of insurance in the U.S. since World War II, but has become unaffordable for employers and employees alike. This article brings historical perspective to how health insurance has been transformed from its not-for-profit origins in the 1930s, how it has become unaffordable in recent decades as it costs more and covers less, and how our multi-payer financing system has failed the public interest. Reform alternativ...

MODELING THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF LACK OF HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE: GAPS IN THE LITERATURE

2000

The decline in the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance has generated concern among policy makers and scholars worried about negative consequences associated with lack of coverage. Moreover, because the health care financing system is intertwined with the labor market, policy makers are concerned about the consequences that any reforms to the health care financing system would have on labor markets and how labor market behavior would influence the success of health care financing reforms.