Download or read book Three Essays on the Health Insurance Coverage of Young Adults written by David Michael Yaskewich and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Wage Inequality and Health Insurance Coverage written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Insurance written by Jeffrey Michael Hulbert and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Social Health Insurance in Developing Countries written by Stephen Ofori Abrokwah and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 2 billion people live in developing countries with health systems constrained by inequitable access and inadequate funding. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 150 million of these people suffer financial breakdown every year having to make unexpected out-of-pocket expenditures for emergency care. To improve health and reduce the financial burden on households, a number of developing countries, including Ghana, Colombia, and Peru, have recently introduced social health insurance programs which are heavily subsidized. The dissertation is a collection of three essays looking at how individual health care choices changed as a result of the availability of insurance coverage in Ghana. The first essay evaluates health care choices and out-of-pocket expenditures after the introduction of social health insurance covering modern health care services. When ill, an individual decides between a set of alternatives; no care, alternative (traditional) medicine, modern care and both alternative and modern care. My results show that when health insurance becomes available, individuals either switch to modern medical care or complement alternative care with modern care. I also find that out-of-pocket expenditures decrease significantly across all the different types of care as a result of health insurance. The second essay studies the effect of health insurance on household fertility decisions and examines whether the effect is due to women likely to become pregnant seeking out insurance or women with insurance changing fertility decisions. To disentangle the effects of adverse selection from moral hazard, I exploit district level variation in the dates of implementation of the national health insurance to instrument for insurance enrollment. My results suggest that both adverse selection and moral hazard effects were present and fertility increased with insurance. The third essay examines the role of social health insurance on prenatal care and expenditure using a two part model. Results show that health insurance increases the propensity of pregnant women to seek prenatal care relative to the uninsured. Insured pregnant women are more likely to seek prenatal care, but conditional on any spending, they spend less out-of-pocket compared to the uninsured.

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Insurance Arrangements Among Married Couples written by David M. Zimmer and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Insurance and Health Care Consumption written by Fei Liu and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third essay investigates the switching behavior of non-elderly enrollees in U.S. managed care plans. Treatment effect analysis is used to examine the disaggregated expenditures of plan switchers and plan stayers prior to their decision to switch or stay. Propensity score matching methods are used to estimate the average treatment effects on the treated. The results, which are based on a national representative data set from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, indicate that switchers (from HMO to non-HMO) spend more on hospitalization. The other type of switchers (from non-HMO to HMO) spends less on prescribed medicine and office-based physician visits. The findings suggest that the non-HMO private managed care plans provide better coverage on hospitalization, office-based physician visits and prescribed medicine than the HMO plans.

Download or read book Three Essays on Access and Welfare in Health Care and Health Insurance Markets written by Nathaniel Denison Mark and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We use a model of health plan choice and subsequent utilization to estimate household preferences in both markets and predict premiums and costs under a counterfactual pooled market. We find that integration mitigates adverse selection issues in the individual market, while decreasing government and employer expenditures on premium subsidies. Small group households benefit from lower premiums for low coverage plans in the merged market. However, they face higher premiums for high coverage plans and are constrained to a smaller set of insurance options. Thus, the effects of integration on small group households are heterogeneous.

Download or read book Three Essays on Supplementary Health Insurance written by Mathilde Péron and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis deals with two questions relative to efficiency and fairness in mixed health insurance systems with partial mandatory coverage and voluntary supplementary health insurance (SHI): (i) the inflationary effect of SHI on medical prices; (ii) the fairness of SHI premiums. We set the analysis in the French context and perform empirical analyses on original individual-level data, collected from the administrative claims of a French insurer (MGEN). The sample is made of 99,878 individuals observed from 2010 to 2012. In Chapter 1, we estimate the causal impact of a generous SHI on patients' decisions to consult physicians who balance bill their patients. We find evidence that better coverage contributes to the rise in medical prices. In Chapter 2, we specify individual heterogeneity in moral hazard and consider its possible correlation with coverage choices. We find evidence of selection on moral hazard: individuals who are more likely to ask for coverage exhibit stronger moral hazard. In Chapter 3, results show that when SHI is voluntary, age-based premiums maximize transfers between low and high healthcare users but do not guarantee vertical equity.

Download or read book Essays on Health Insurance and the Family written by Marcus Owen Dillender and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three chapters of this dissertation explore the ties among health insurance, changing cultural institution, and labor economics. The first chapter focuses on the relationship between health insurance and wages by taking advantage of states that extended health insurance dependent coverage to young adults before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Using American Community Survey and Census data, I find evidence that extending health insurance to young adults raises their wages, both while they are eligible for insurance through their parents' employers and afterwards. The increases in wages can be explained by increases in human capital and increased flexibility in the labor market that comes from people no longer having to rely on their own employers for health insurance. The second chapter focuses on understanding the impact of allowing coverage of spouses through employer-sponsored health insurance. The fact that people choose to enter into marriage makes comparing the differences between married and unmarried couples uninformative. To get around this, I examine how shocks to access to insurance through a spouse's employer brought on by extensions in legal recognition have influenced health insurance and labor force decisions for same-sex couples. I find extending legal recognition to same-sex couples results in female same-sex couples being more likely to have one member not in the labor force. The third chapter examines what extending legal recognition to same-sex couples has done to marriage rates in the United States using a strategy that compares how marriage rates change after legal recognition in states that alter legal recognition versus states that do not. Despite claims that allowing same-sex couples to marry will reduce the marriage rate for opposite-sex couples, I find no evidence that allowing same-sex couples to marry reduces the opposite-sex marriage rate. The opposite-sex marriage rate does decrease, however, when domestic partnerships are available to opposite-sex couples.

Download or read book Three Essays on Public Health Insurance Quality Access and Cost of Health Care written by Tianyan Hu and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medicaid and Medicare are two major public programs that help vulnerable groups of people to gain coverage of health care services. There are various ongoing debates on the Medicaid- and Medicare-related issues. Among those, some topics draw most of attentions.

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Care Spending written by Minkyoung Yoo and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three essays that consider the determinants and persistence of health care spending and how policies that control increasing health care costs affect the distribution of health care spending in the U.S. In the first essay, I study the association between education and health care spending for a set of health conditions amenable to self-management. Empirical findings from estimated health expenditure models reveal strong inverse relationships between education and health care spending among elderly adults with hypertension and/or asthma. Additionally, I find that greater educational attainment is associated with a reduced likelihood of being in the top 5% of health care spenders for elderly adults with hypertension and nonelderly adults with diabetes, and also with less severe conditions. The second essay assesses how the distribution of family out-of-pocket health care spending has been affected by changes in recent cost-sharing to understand the effectiveness of the risk protection function of private health insurance against high medical care expenses. The results suggest that families who rely more on health care because of one or more their member's existing health conditions are most affected by changes in cost sharing during the period 2001-2005 and the increased exposure to out-of-pocket spending occurrs primarily for families at higher percentiles of the out-of-pocket spending distribution, thus reducing the "return" to risk protection from holding private health insurance. The final essay examines the dynamics of out-of-pocket health care spending by looking at the persistence of such spending among Medicare beneficiaries. The findings suggest that having a certain chronic condition or a health shock clearly increases the probability of out-of-pocket health care spending persistence. Additionally, having an existing health insurance that supplements Medicare coverage or the acquisition of a new supplementary health insurance has a significant impact on the probability of persistence.

Download or read book Essays in Health Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in health economics related issues. In the first chapter, I estimated health insurance expansion's effects on young adults' employment using MEPS. In 2010 young adults were allowed to stay on their parent's health insurance plan until the age of 26 by a policy change under the ACA. I used a difference-in-differences model to estimate labor supply effects of this policy on young adults. 23-25-year-olds are in the treatment group, and 26-30-year-olds are in the control group. Additionally, I estimated heterogeneity of the policy's labor supply effect by socio-economic groups. I found that extensive and intensive labor supply decreased among males. The effect is greater among men in higher socio-economic group. In the second chapter, I analyzed whether internet use has an effect on patients' mental health using BRFSS data. Over the last decade internet use has become universal. It provides various health related tools and information sources which may affect patients' distress levels in several ways, and health related distress can have large impacts on quality of life. I used variation across states' "right of way" policies during the broadband boom period of 2001-2005. Using rights of way rules' easiness as a proxy for broadband penetration rates, I investigated whether patients' mental health levels changed differently in states with more lenient rights of way rules. I found that among men internet use improves patients' mental health. In the third chapter, I studied labor market effects of the early Medicaid expansions under the ACA in 2010 using data from Current Population Survey. The ACA extends public insurance coverage to low income childless adults, yet we know very little about the effect of a public health insurance extension on childless adults' labor supply. The ACA allowed states to extend Medicaid and a number of states opted in early and extended Medicaid in 2010. I utilized this variation among states to evaluate whether the policy had any effect on childless adults' employment. I found that the policy had no effect on labor supply of the overall population. I found evidence that the policy mainly affected near-retirement-aged childless

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Economics written by Archita Banik and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Labor and Health Economics written by Dajung Jun and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonportable fringe benefits, such as health insurance and retirement benefits, can influence an individual's career decisions and financial well-being. To protect employee's utility, state and federal governments enacted policies that regulated these benefits. The first two chapters of my dissertation study two such policies: tax credits for private health insurance coverage and dependent coverage mandates that allowed young adults to be covered through their parents' insurance. I examine the effects of these policies on several health and labor market outcomes. In the last chapter, my coauthor and I explore a slightly different perspective on fringe benefits. We examine to what extent lifetime earnings could explain the variation in wealth at retirement. By researching these topics, I contribute to the understanding of how fringe benefits and lifetime earnings affected outcomes of rational decision-making: health insurance take-up, job mobility and wealth accumulation.In chapter 1, I investigate the effectiveness of tax credits on health insurance premiums. There was a renewed interest in using tax credits to increase health insurance coverage after the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Health Insurance Tax Credit (HITC) was implemented between 1991--1993 to reduce the burden of health insurance premiums primarily for low-income families. Although it was active for three years, this policy has been studied in only one previous study. In this chapter, I examine the effectiveness of the HITC by using the Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP), and I provide the first estimates of its effects on healthcare utilization and self‐reported health status. My results align with previous studies and suggest the HITC increased the health insurance take-up by 5.8 percentage points. The implementation of the HITC also significantly improved the self-reported health status of respondents.In the second chapter, I analyze the effects of dependent coverage mandates on working fathers' job mobility and compensation. Due to the low rates of health insurance coverage among young adults, some state governments began mandating health insurance companies to allow adult children to stay on their parents' health insurance plans. First implemented in 1995, these mandates aimed to increase health coverage among young adults. In 2010, the federal government enacted a more comprehensive version of the dependent coverage mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act. These state- and federal-level efforts successfully increased insurance rates for young adults, but they might have also come with unintended consequences for parents. Parents who placed a high value on health insurance for their young adult children might be reluctant to leave jobs with employer-provided health insurance, and employers might offset the mandated-incurred health care costs by reducing other types of employee benefits or earnings. To assess the extent of such consequences, I study the effects of both the state and federal dependent health insurance mandates on fathers. By analyzing the 2004 and 2008 SIPP panels, which are linked with Detailed Earnings Records and Business Registrar data from the United States Census, I examine the mandates' effects on fathers' voluntary job separation rates (job-lock and job-push) and changes in their compensation. After the implementation of the mandates, I observe a significant decrease in the likelihood of voluntary job separation among eligible working fathers aged 45--64 with employer-provided health insurance. Additionally for these fathers, except for those who separated from these jobs within the current wave, my analysis slightly evidences that the mandates reduced the total monetary compensation. In the last chapter, we investigate the impact of lifetime earnings on retirement wealth. Historically, many households accumulated substantial wealth by retirement, while many other households accumulated very little. Venti and Wise (1999, 2001) directly examine this question by utilizing data that was superior to that available to previous researchers and conclude that ``the bulk of the dispersion must be attributed to differences in the amount that households choose to save.'' In this paper, we examine the extent that a remaining problem in their data affected their results: Their measure of lifetime earnings, despite being based on administrative data, was subject to topcoding in each year. Using the 2001 SIPP that was not subject to the same problem, we find that the effect of the topcoding was substantial. At least 35 percent of individuals were misclassified in each of the top four deciles. When replicating a key result of Venti and Wise (2001), our findings suggest that the correlation between lifetime earnings and savings was about 50\\% greater than what was found when using censored deciles. This increased explanatory power came largely at the expense of the other variables in the regression model.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Health Insurance Labor Markets and Migration written by Ricki Marie Sears Dolan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three chapters, two which focus on health insurance and one focusing on migration. The first chapter examines how a policy expanding public health insurance for young children affected their parents' labor market and health insurance outcomes. I use variation in the initial income thresholds, children's age cutoffs and timing of implementation across states to estimate the effect of a person's youngest child gaining access to public health insurance on self-employment. I find that having a child become Medicaid eligible increases a father's self-employment and increases his business income. I find no significant effect on self-employment for mothers, but I find that the increasing eligibility is associated with a large negative effect on their probability of remaining in a wage job. The second chapter examines how expanding dependent health insurance for young adults affects the health insurance and labor market outcomes of those young adults and their parents. I exploit two sources of variations in the age at which young adults age out of their parents' health insurance: i) state reforms passed between 2000 and 2010 that extended the maximum age of health insurance dependents beyond 18 and ii) the Affordable Care Act that extended coverage for all young adults in the United States until their 26th birthdays. Using regression discontinuity, I find evidence that the policies increased young adult dependent coverage. Dependent coverage for eligible young adults increased by 8 percentage points over ineligible young adults, while health insurance in the young adults' own name decreased by 6.5 percentage points. I also see evidence that parents of eligible young adults responded by changing their own coverage. The final chapter investigates the relationship between children and migration using data from the American Communities Survey. To address the issue that both migration and fertility might be correlated with unobserved variables I use twin births as an instrumental variable for the number of children. I find that that an additional child decreases migration by 0.6 percentage points and decreases the probability that a woman lives in her birth state by 1.4 percentage points. This suggests that more children hinder migration.

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics and Public Policy written by Olga V. Milliken and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Insurance Regulation and the Labor Market written by James Bailey and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work. Chapter 1 examines the effect of state-level health insurance mandates, which are regulations intended to expand access to health insurance. It finds that these regulations have the unintended consequence of increasing insurance premiums, and that these regulations have been responsible for 9-23% of premium increases since 1996. The main contribution of the chapter is that its results are more general than previous work, since it considers many more years of data, and it studies the employer-based plans that cover most Americans rather than the much less common individual plans. Whereas Chapter 1 estimates the effect of the average mandate on premiums, Chapter 2 focuses on a specific mandate, one that requires insurers to cover prostate cancer screenings. The focus on a single mandate allows a broader and more careful analysis that demonstrates how health policies spill over to affect the labor market. I find that the mandate has a significant negative effect on the labor market outcomes of the very group it was intended to help. The mandate expands the treatments health insurance covers for men over age 50, but by doing so it makes them more expensive to insure and employ. Employers respond to this added expense by lowering wages and hiring fewer men over age 50. According to the theoretical model put forward in the chapter, this suggests the mandate reduces total welfare. Chapter 3 shows that the employer-based health insurance system has deterred entrepreneurship. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the Affordable Care Act's dependent coverage mandate, which de-linked insurance from employment for many 19-25 year olds. Difference-in-difference estimates show that the mandate increased self-employment among the treated group by 13-24%. Instrumental variables estimates show that those who actually received parental health insurance as a result of the mandate were drastically more likely to start their own business. This suggest that concerns over health insurance are a major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States.