What Does (Formal) Health Insurance Do, and for Whom?
Name
w23718.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
412.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
aad17e345f1de87623091a024cfa79ac
Author(s)
Finkelstein, Amy
Mahoney, Neale
Notowidigdo, Matthew J
Date Issued
2018
Journal
The Annual Review of Economics
Publisher
Annual Reviews
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
© 2018 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved. Health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. However, because the nominally uninsured pay only a small share of their medical expenses, health insurance also provides substantial transfers to nonrecipient parties who would otherwise bear the costs of providing uncompensated care to the uninsured. The prevalence of uncompensated care helps explain the limited take-up of heavily subsidized public health insurance and the evidence that many recipients value formal health insurance at substantially less than the cost to insurers of providing that coverage. The distributional implications of public subsidies for health insurance depend critically on the ultimate economic incidence of the transfers that they deliver to providers of uncompensated care.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1146/ANNUREV-ECONOMICS-080217-053608
