Download or read book Expanding Consumer Choice and Addressing adverse Selection Concerns in Health Insurance written by United States. Congress. Joint Economic Committee and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Expanding Consumer Choice and Addressing Adverse Selection Concerns in Health Insurance S Hrg 108 766 September 22 2004 108 2 Hearing written by and published by . This book was released on 2005* with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Care Without Coverage written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2002-06-20 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.
Download or read book Information Frictions and Adverse Selection written by Benjamin R. Handel and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A large literature has analyzed pricing inefficiencies in health insurance markets due to adverse selection, typically assuming informed, active consumers on the demand side of the market. However, recent evidence suggests that many consumers have information frictions that lead to suboptimal health plan choices. As a result, policies such as information provision, plan recommendations, and smart defaults to improve consumer choices are being implemented in many applied contexts. In this paper we develop a general framework to study insurance market equilibrium and evaluate policy interventions in the presence of choice frictions. Friction-reducing policies can increase welfare by facilitating better matches between consumers and plans, but can decrease welfare by increasing the correlation between willingness-to-pay and costs, exacerbating adverse selection. We identify relationships between the underlying distributions of consumer (i) costs (ii) surplus from risk protection and (iii) choice frictions that determine whether friction-reducing policies will be on net welfare increasing or reducing. We extend the analysis to study how policies to improve consumer choices interact with the supply-side policy of risk-adjustment transfers and show that the effectiveness of the latter policy can have important implications for the effectiveness of the former. We implement the model empirically using proprietary data on insurance choices, utilization, and consumer information from a large firm. We leverage structural estimates from prior work with these data and highlight how the model's micro-foundations can be estimated in practice. In our specific setting, we find that friction-reducing policies exacerbate adverse selection, essentially leading to the market fully unraveling, and reduce welfare. Risk-adjustment transfers are complementary, substantially mitigating the negative impact of friction-reducing policies, but having little effect in their absence.
Download or read book Health Care Utilization as a Proxy in Disability Determination written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social Security Administration (SSA) administers two programs that provide benefits based on disability: the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This report analyzes health care utilizations as they relate to impairment severity and SSA's definition of disability. Health Care Utilization as a Proxy in Disability Determination identifies types of utilizations that might be good proxies for "listing-level" severity; that is, what represents an impairment, or combination of impairments, that are severe enough to prevent a person from doing any gainful activity, regardless of age, education, or work experience.
Download or read book How Adverse Selection Affects the Health Insurance Market written by Paolo Belli and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2001 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There may be a price to pay (in terms of inefficient coverage) if competition among health insurers is encouraged as a way to give patients greater choice and to achieve better control over insurance providers.
Download or read book Choice Matters written by Gordon Moore and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The direct-to-consumer business model has transformed how people seek out goods and services from music to mortgages. So what happens now that the revolution has come for healthcare? While consumers have begun to insist on healthcare that is as convenient and personalized as nearly every other good or service they purchase, most healthcare provider organizations, physicians, and insurance companies remain woefully unprepared to meet this demand. Choice Matters is the healthcare sector's guide to understanding and delivering the brand of consumer-centered care that is an imperative for the Zocdoc age. Drawing on the authors' diverse backgrounds in medicine, business, and public policy, this practically-oriented resource offers an on-the-ground introduction for clinicians and managers to better understand: · The differences between healthcare and other consumer-driven markets · What factors are most important for consumers in seeking care providers · How consumers make decisions about healthcare · The system-wide effects of increased consumer choice in healthcare · The important distinction between patients and consumers By celebrating the possibilities inherent to consumer-centered healthcare, Choice Matters offers a refreshing, empirically informed take on how healthcare in the United States can flourish, not wither, in the new economy.
Download or read book Choice Price Competition and Complexity in Markets for Health Insurance written by Richard G. Frank and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States and other nations rely on consumer choice and price competition among competing health plans to allocate resources in the health sector. A great deal of research has examined the efficiency consequences of adverse selection in health insurance markets, less attention has been devoted to other aspects of consumer choice. The nation of Switzerland offers a unique opportunity to study price competition in health insurance markets. Switzerland regulates health insurance markets with the aim of minimizing adverse selection and encouraging strong price competition. We examine consumer responses to price differences in local markets and the degree of price variation in local markets. Using both survey data and observations on local markets we obtain evidence suggesting that as the number of choices offered to individuals grow their willingness to switch plans given a set of price dispersion differences declines allowing large price differences for relatively homogeneous products to persist. We consider explanations for this phenomenon from economics and psychology.
Download or read book Moral Hazard in Health Insurance written by Amy Finkelstein and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the challenge of covering heath care expenses—while minimizing economic risks. Moral hazard—the tendency to change behavior when the cost of that behavior will be borne by others—is a particularly tricky question when considering health care. Kenneth J. Arrow’s seminal 1963 paper on this topic (included in this volume) was one of the first to explore the implication of moral hazard for health care, and Amy Finkelstein—recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic—here examines this issue in the context of contemporary American health care policy. Drawing on research from both the original RAND Health Insurance Experiment and her own research, including a 2008 Health Insurance Experiment in Oregon, Finkelstein presents compelling evidence that health insurance does indeed affect medical spending and encourages policy solutions that acknowledge and account for this. The volume also features commentaries and insights from other renowned economists, including an introduction by Joseph P. Newhouse that provides context for the discussion, a commentary from Jonathan Gruber that considers provider-side moral hazard, and reflections from Joseph E. Stiglitz and Kenneth J. Arrow. “Reads like a fireside chat among a group of distinguished, articulate health economists.” —Choice
Download or read book Frontiers in Health Policy Research written by David M. Cutler and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading economists discuss current health policy challenges, including prescription drugs benefits as a component of Medicare and conversion to for-profit health plans.
Download or read book Adverse Selection in Health Insurance written by David M. Cutler and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individual choice over health insurance policies may result in risk-based sorting across plans. Such adverse selection induces three types of losses: efficiency losses from individuals being allocated to the wrong plans; risk sharing losses since premium variability is increased; and losses from insurers distorting their policies to improve their mix of insureds. We discuss the potential for these losses, and present empirical evidence on adverse selection in two groups of employees: Harvard University, and the Group Insurance Commission of Massachusetts (serving state and local employees). In both groups, adverse selection is a significant concern. At Harvard, the University's decision to contribute an equal amount to all insurance plans led to the disappearance of the most generous policy within 3 years. At the GIC, adverse selection has been contained by subsidizing premiums on a proportional basis and managing the most generous policy very tightly. A combination of prospective or retrospective risk adjustment, coupled with reinsurance for high cost cases, seems promising as a way to provide appropriate incentives for enrollees and to reduce losses from adverse selection.
Download or read book Critical Perspectives on Health Care written by Bridey Heing and published by Enslow Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, the healthcare debate has swirled for decades as politicians, pundits, and citizens try to find a solution to the ongoing question of how best to meet the public's need for quality medical care at affordable prices. The introduction of new programs over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries set a precedent for minimum levels of care. Despite these programs, millions remain uninsured across the country. This collection of essays will interrogate the debate on healthcare, providing students with a wide-ranging look at the competing ideas, policies, and viewpoints that intersect on this important issue.
Download or read book Adverse selection and switching costs in health insurance markets when nudging hurts written by Benjamin R. Handel and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates consumer switching costs in the context of health insurance markets, where adverse selection is a potential concern. Though previous work has studied these phenomena in isolation, they interact in a way that directly impacts market outcomes and consumer welfare. Our identification strategy leverages a unique natural experiment that occurred at a large firm where we also observe individual-level panel data on health insurance choices and medical claims. We present descriptive results to show that (i) switching costs are large and (ii) adverse selection is present. To formalize this analysis we develop and estimate a choice model that jointly quantifies switching costs, risk preferences, and ex ante health risk. We use these estimates to study the welfare impact of an information provision policy that nudges consumers toward better decisions by reducing switching costs. This policy increases welfare in a naive setting where insurance plan prices are held fixed. However, when insurance prices change endogenously to reflect updated enrollee risk pools, the same policy substantially exacerbates adverse selection and reduces consumer welfare, doubling the existing welfare loss from adverse selection.
Download or read book Employment and Health Benefits written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1993-02-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States is unique among economically advanced nations in its reliance on employers to provide health benefits voluntarily for workers and their families. Although it is well known that this system fails to reach millions of these individuals as well as others who have no connection to the work place, the system has other weaknesses. It also has many advantages. Because most proposals for health care reform assume some continued role for employers, this book makes an important contribution by describing the strength and limitations of the current system of employment-based health benefits. It provides the data and analysis needed to understand the historical, social, and economic dynamics that have shaped present-day arrangements and outlines what might be done to overcome some of the access, value, and equity problems associated with current employer, insurer, and government policies and practices. Health insurance terminology is often perplexing, and this volume defines essential concepts clearly and carefully. Using an array of primary sources, it provides a store of information on who is covered for what services at what costs, on how programs vary by employer size and industry, and on what governments doâ€"and do not doâ€"to oversee employment-based health programs. A case study adapted from real organizations' experiences illustrates some of the practical challenges in designing, managing, and revising benefit programs. The sometimes unintended and unwanted consequences of employer practices for workers and health care providers are explored. Understanding the concepts of risk, biased risk selection, and risk segmentation is fundamental to sound health care reform. This volume thoroughly examines these key concepts and how they complicate efforts to achieve efficiency and equity in health coverage and health care. With health care reform at the forefront of public attention, this volume will be important to policymakers and regulators, employee benefit managers and other executives, trade associations, and decisionmakers in the health insurance industry, as well as analysts, researchers, and students of health policy.
Download or read book Consumer Choices and Transparency in the Health Insurance Industry written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Theory of Demand for Health Insurance written by John A. Nyman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people buy health insurance? Conventional theory holds that people purchase insurance because they prefer the certainty of paying a small premium to the risk of getting sick and paying a large medical bill. This book presents a new theory of consumer demand for health insurance. It holds that people purchase insurance to obtain additional "income" when they become ill.
Download or read book Choice Price Competition and Complexity in Markets for Health Insurance written by Richard G. Frank and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States and other nations rely on consumer choice and price competition among competing health plans to allocate resources in the health sector. A great deal of research has examined the efficiency consequences of adverse selection in health insurance markets, less attention has been devoted to other aspects of consumer choice. The nation of Switzerland offers a unique opportunity to study price competition in health insurance markets. Switzerland regulates health insurance markets with the aim of minimizing adverse selection and encouraging strong price competition. We examine consumer responses to price differences in local markets and the degree of price variation in local markets. Using both survey data and observations on local markets we obtain evidence suggesting that as the number of choices offered to individuals grow their willingness to switch plans given a set of price dispersion differences declines allowing large price differences for relatively homogeneous products to persist. We consider explanations for this phenomenon from economics and psychology.
