Download or read book The Role of Tax Subsidies in the Market for Health Insurance written by Mark Stabile and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the role of tax subsidies in linking the market for health insurance to the employment relationship. Using both American and Canadian data, it investigates how these subsidies influence whether health insurance coverage is offered in different sized firms and whether it is offered through an employer versus the individual private market. The findings indicate that tax subsidies encourage the provision of insurance in smaller firms. Removal of the subsidies would cause the level of insurance in small firms to decline significantly, but would not cause a large change in the level of insurance in larger firms. Part of this decline would be offset by increases in the market for individually purchased insurance.
Download or read book Using Taxes to Reform Health Insurance written by Henry Aaron and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brookings Institution Press and Urban Institute publication Few people realize that one of the nation's largest health programs runs through the tax system. Reformers of all stripes propose to modify current tax rules as part of larger programs to increase coverage and control costs. Is the current system working? Will tax-based reforms achieve their goals? Several of the nation's foremost experts on taxation and health policy address these questions in Using Taxes to Reform Health Insurance, a joint product of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the American Tax Policy Institute. Led by respected economists Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution and Leonard Burman of the Urban Institute, contributors examine the role taxes currently play, the likely effects of recently introduced health savings accounts, the challenges of administering major subsidies for health insurance through the tax system, and options for using the tax system to expand health insurance coverage. No taxpayer or consumer of health care services can afford to ignore these issues.
Download or read book The Tax Treatment of Employment based Health Insurance written by Leonard Burman and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I. Introduction -- II. Background -- III. Rationale for a tax subsidy for health insurance -- IV. How the tax exclusion affects the health insurance market -- V. Who benefits from the tax exclusion? -- VI. Options for changing the tax subsidy -- Appendix. Simulating options for taxing premiums for employment-based health insurance.
Download or read book The Importance of Group Coverage written by Melissa A. Thomasson and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1954, the Internal Revenue Service stipulated that employer contributions to the health insurance plans of their employees were to be excluded from employee taxable income. Today, the tax subsidy is major feature of the U.S. health care market. This paper examines the initial effects of the tax subsidy on the demand for health insurance using previously unexamined data from 1953 and 1958. Results suggest that the tax subsidy increased the growth of group insurance, particularly among union members and employed persons. This is a critical effect because group insurance is not only less expensive than individual insurance, but it is also easier to obtain, and households with access to group health insurance are far more likely to purchase health insurance coverage than those without similar access. By increasing access to group insurance, the tax subsidy fostered an increase in the purchase of group health insurance by people who may not have purchased individual coverage, and generated institutional change as it cemented an employment-based system of group health insurance in the United States.
Download or read book Tax Subsidies for Health Insurance written by Jonathan Gruber and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The continued rise in the number of non-elderly Americans without health insurance has led to considerable interest in tax-based policies to raise the level of insurance coverage. This paper describes a detailed microsimulation model that has been developed to evaluate such tax-based polices, and its findings for the impact of polices on government costs and insurance coverage. I find that while tax subsidies could significantly increase insurance coverage, even very generous tax policies could not cover more than a sizable minority of the uninsured population. But there are several design features which can clearly make tax policy more effective: using tax credits rather than deductions; making credits refundable; and addressing the timing mismatch between when insurance purchases are made and tax refunds are received. I also document a clear tradeoff between the scope of tax subsidies and their efficiency.
Download or read book Revising the Tax Treatment of Employer provided Health Insurance written by Sherry Glied and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 1994 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses tax treatments and how they relate to employer-provided health insurance.
Download or read book Tax Incentives and the Decision to Purchase Health Insurance written by Jonathan Gruber and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tax Reform Act of 1986 introduced a new tax subsidy for health insurance purchases by self-employed persons. This paper analyzes the changing patterns of insurance demand before and after this reform to generate new estimates of how the after tax price of insurance affects the discrete choice of whether to buy insurance. We employ both traditional regression models for insurance demand, in which after-tax price of insurance is an explanatory variable. as well as nonparametric tests that compare changes in insurance purchases by self-employed individuals with the coincident changes for other groups. Our analysis suggests that I one percent increase in the cost of insurance coverage reduces the probability that a self-employed household will be insured by as much as 1.8 percentage points.
Download or read book Tax Subsidies to Employer provided Health Insurance written by Jonathan Gruber and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the current tax subsidy to employer- provided health insurance, and presents new evidence on the economic effects of various tax reforms. It argues that previous analyses have overstated the tax subsidy to employer-provided insurance by neglecting the substantial and growing importance of after-tax employee payments for employer-provided insurance, as well as the tax subsidy for extreme medical expenses, which discourages insurance purchase. Even after considering these factors, however, the net tax subsidy to employer-provided insurance is substantial, with tax factors generating an average reduction of approximately thirty percent in the price of this insurance. Reducing the tax subsidy, either by capping the value of employer-provided health insurance that could be excluded from taxation, or eliminating the exclusion entirely, would have substantial effects on the level of employer- provided insurance and on tax revenues.
Download or read book Empowering Health Care Consumers Through Tax Reform written by Grace-Marie Arnett and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Because of our tax system, most Americans have the wrong kind of insurance, and some Americans cannot afford any insurance. This book shows how tax reform can lead to more appropriate and more affordable health insurance. It is worth careful reading by our policy makers and by anyone concerned with health care in America." Prof. Martin Feldstein
Download or read book Federal Tax Incentives for Health Insurance written by Allegra N. Kim and published by California State Library. This book was released on 2007 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Entrepreneurship and Job Lock written by Sayeh Nikpay and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper demonstrates that health insurance tax subsidies increase self-employment, but that the effect differs substantially based on nongroup market regulations and health status. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I show that households that cannot purchase health insurance because of a preexisting condition do not respond to tax subsidies in states in which they would be denied insurance, but they respond strongly in states in which they face risk-rated premiums. Households respond similarly to tax subsidies in states with nongroup market regulations similar to those established by the Affordable Care Act, regardless of preexisting conditions.
Download or read book Subsidies to Employee Health Insurance Premiums and the Health Insurance Market written by Jonathan Gruber and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One approach to covering the uninsured that is frequently advocated by policy makers is subsidizing the employee portion of employer-provided health insurance premiums. But, since the vast majority of those offered employer-provided health insurance already take it up, such an approach is only appealing if there is a very high takeup elasticity among those who are offered and uninsured. Moreover, if plan choice decisions are price elastic, then such subsidies can at the same time increase health care costs by inducing selection of more expensive plans. We study an excellent example of such subsidies: the introduction of pre-tax premiums for postal employees in 1994, and then for the remaining federal employees in 2000. We do so using a census of personnel records for all federal employees from 1991 through 2002. We find that there is a very small elasticity of insurance takeup with respect to its after-tax price, and a modest elasticity of plan choice. Our results suggest that the federal government did little to improve insurance coverage, but much to increase health care expenditures, through this policy change.
Download or read book Tax Subsidies the Rational Demand for Insurance and the Health Care Crisis written by Martin Feldstein and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Public Policy and Health Care Market written by Shuyang Yang and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on examining the impact of public spending in health insurance and health care markets. Health care subsidies account for a fast-growing share of public expenditures in many developed and developing countries, making them an ever more important component of fiscal policy discussions. Two principle projects constitute my dissertation research. In the first project, I examine the heterogeneity in the impact of subsidized health insurance coverage on individual welfare, in the context of a Chinese public health insurance program. In the course of this research, I have also developed new econometric methods to address the empirical challenges of studying the effects of health insurance. These methods have broad applications beyond topics in health economics. In the second project, I look at the role of tax subsidies in the supply of health care. In particular, I exploit variations in state and federal level tax policies in the U.S to estimate the impact of government subsidies on ownership choice, provision of public services and the quality of hospitals. The first chapter of the dissertation mainly assesses the effect of public health insurance on program beneficiaries' welfare, by evaluating a new national public medical insurance program in China, Urban Resident Basic Insurance (URBMI). This program, introduced in 2007 and having an annual fiscal expenditure of 30 billion RMB, aims to provide coverage to more than 200 million urban residents including elderly, children, college students and unemployed adults. I exploit the city-variation in policy generosity as an exogenous determinant of URBMI enrollment. Using data from the Chinese Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), I find that URBMI increases welfare on several margins. Having insurance coverage increases health care spending while decreasing the out-of-pocket payments, providing protection from the financial risk. It also increases efficiency in medical spending by inducing the use of preventative care and reducing the probability of hospitalization. In terms of health outcomes, insurance coverage has a significant impact on subjective self-ratings in health and happiness. I also extend my examination to consider the labor market effects of URBMI. Since this program provides insurance coverage outside of employment status, it will potentially increase an individual's mobility between jobs and impact the retirement decision. In Chapter 2, building on the results of the first chapter, I explore the heterogeneity in the impact of health insurance through a semiparametric model. Since URBMI is a national program covering a wide range of subpopulations, observed and unobserved individual characteristics may play an important role in determining the response of an individual to insurance coverage. This chapter builds a panel data model with endogenous treatment, which incorporates unobserved individual heterogeneity non-additively into the outcome. The model is estimated in the context of a semiparametric setting. I first propose a two-stage semiparametric least square (SLS) method to consistently estimate the model parameters and then conduct a localized 2SLS procedure to recover the quantile treatment effect. Identification, consistency, and root-N asymptotic normality of estimators for parameters and marginal effects are proved. The estimation results reveal substantial variation in the impact of URBMI by age, income and gender. Children, the elderly above the age of 70, and females ages 25-40 benefit the most from the program. Adult males and individuals with incomes below the median level do not respond significantly to insurance coverage. The findings of heterogeneous insurance effects have important policy implications for the cost-effectiveness of URBMI across population groups, suggesting the need for differentiated insurance programs. In the third chapter, another form of subsidy in health care markets is studied. This chapter focuses on assessing the effect of government subsidies on the supply side of the health care market in the U.S. An important form of government subsidies to health care providers is the tax exemption for non-profit organizations. The validity and efficiency of such practice has long been under debate. Recently, many state and federal laws have been enacted that mandate the reporting of benefits provided to the community by non-profit providers. This chapter studies the hospital sector. Given the preferential tax treatment for nonprofit hospitals, the tax rate, in conjunction with community benefit reporting requirement (CRR), determine the net subsidy provided to a nonprofit hospital compared to its for-profit counterpart. I exploit the variation in tax policy across states and over time to identify the effect of tax subsidy on the ownership choice of hospitals. I further differentiate behavior between nonprofit versus for-profit hospitals, including cost, provision of undercompensated care as well as quality. Using Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services(CMS) hospital cost report data from 1996 to 2015, I estimate a 4-6 percent increase in the probability of non-profit conversion into for-profit hospitals due to the enactment of CRR. Moreover, the effect of CRR diminishes with the tax rate. My results further show that hospitals divert community benefit spending to teaching to meet the requirement of CRR, rather than increasing provision of uncompensated care.
Download or read book Voluntary Health Insurance in Europe Country Experience written by Sagan A. and published by World Health Organization. This book was released on 2016-07-20 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No two markets for voluntary health insurance (VHI) are identical. All differ in some way because they are heavily shaped by the nature and performance of publicly financed health systems and by the contexts in which they have evolved. This volume contains short structured profiles of markets for VHI in 34 countries in Europe. These are drawn from European Union member states plus Armenia Iceland Georgia Norway the Russian Federation Switzerland and Ukraine. The book is aimed at policy-makers and researchers interested in knowing more about how VHI works in practice in a wide range of contexts. Each profile written by one or more local experts identifies gaps in publicly-financed health coverage describes the role VHI plays outlines the way in which the market for VHI operates summarises public policy towards VHI including major developments over time and highlights national debates and challenges. The book is part of a study on VHI in Europe prepared jointly by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and the WHO Regional Office for Europe. A companion volume provides an analytical overview of VHI markets across the 34 countries.
Download or read book Health Insurance Exchanges Premium Tax Credits and Changes to Health Plans written by Elliot Carpenter and published by Nova Snova. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2014, millions of individuals have purchased coverage through the health insurance exchanges established under Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). PPACA altered the individual health insurance market by setting federal standards for coverage and subsidizing exchange coverage for certain low-income individuals. In the first 5 years of exchanges, issuers have moved in and out of the market and increased premiums, but little is known about issuers' claims costs or the factors driving their business decisions. Chapter 1 examines (1) claims costs of issuers participating in exchanges, and (2) factors driving selected issuers' changes in exchange participation, premiums, and plan design. GAO reviewed data from nine issuers participating in five states, which were selected to represent a range in size, tax status, and exchange participation. During open enrollment, eligible returning consumers may re-enroll in their existing health insurance exchange plan or choose a different plan. Those who do not actively enroll in a plan may be automatically re-enrolled into a plan. Chapter 2 examines 1) the extent to which plans identified as benchmark plans remained the same plans from year to year, and how premiums for benchmark plans changed; 2) the proportion of exchange consumers who were automatically re-enrolled into the same or similar plans, and how these proportions compared to those for consumers who actively re-enrolled, and 3) the extent to which consumers' financial responsibility for premiums changed for those who were automatically re-enrolled compared to those who actively re-enrolled. Chapter 3 discussed the amendments to title XIX of the Social Security Act to ensure health insurance coverage continuity for former foster youth. Certain individuals without access to subsidized health insurance coverage may be eligible for premium tax credits, as established under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA; P.L. 111-148, as amended). The dollar amount of the premium credit varies from individual to individual, based on a formula specified in statute. Individuals who are eligible for the premium credit, however, generally are still required to contribute some amount toward the purchase of health insurance as described in chapter 4. During the summer of 2018, the Trump Administration issued final rules governing coverage offered through association health plans (AHPs) and short-term, limited-duration insurance. Chapter 5 describes how the Congressional Budget Office and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) analyzed the new rules and determined how those rules would affect the agencies' projections of the number of people who obtain health insurance and the costs of federal subsidies for that coverage.
Download or read book Coverage Matters written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-10-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roughly 40 million Americans have no health insurance, private or public, and the number has grown steadily over the past 25 years. Who are these children, women, and men, and why do they lack coverage for essential health care services? How does the system of insurance coverage in the U.S. operate, and where does it fail? The first of six Institute of Medicine reports that will examine in detail the consequences of having a large uninsured population, Coverage Matters: Insurance and Health Care, explores the myths and realities of who is uninsured, identifies social, economic, and policy factors that contribute to the situation, and describes the likelihood faced by members of various population groups of being uninsured. It serves as a guide to a broad range of issues related to the lack of insurance coverage in America and provides background data of use to policy makers and health services researchers.
