Tag Archives: Health Insurance

Health Insurance for “Humans”: Information Frictions, Plan Choice, and Consumer Welfare

Posted on September 2, 2013 by

From Ben Handel and Jonathan Kolstad: Traditional models of insurance choice are predicated on fully informed and rational consumers protecting themselves from exposure to financial risk.  In practice, choosing an insurance plan from a set of complex non-linear contracts is a complicated decision often made … Continue reading →

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A Nice Profile of Leemore Dafny & Her Work on Competition in Health Insurance Markets

Posted on May 30, 2013 by

She […] determine[d] that insurers charge more profitable businesses higher premiums, a relationship strongest in geographic markets with a small number of carriers. Beyond higher costs, scant competition also probably causes “a lack of innovation,” she said. She published her … Continue reading →

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Horrible Situation, Interesting Economics Experiment

Posted on May 25, 2013 by

From a NYTimes article on new Medicaid coverage holes in certain states, i.e. Texas, Florida, Kansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia, which are refusing to expand Medicaid: In most cases, she said, adults with incomes from 32 percent to 100 percent of the … Continue reading →

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The Effect of U.S. Health Insurance Expansions on Medical Innovation

Posted on March 28, 2013 by

Here’s an interesting recent paper by Jeff Clemens on the effect of health insurance expansions on medical innovation. Abstract: I study the effect of health insurance expansions on medical innovation. Innovation by practitioners creates important roles for local patient flows and payment … Continue reading →

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The Medicare Eligibility Age: Impacts on Health Behavior and Outcomes

Posted on December 9, 2012 by

Since many people are talking about raising the medicare eligibility age (e.g. Maya MacGuineas vs. Aaron E. Carroll, Matt Yglesias, Jared Bernstein, etc), I thought I’d highlight an AER paper by David Card, Carlos Dobkin, and Nicole Maestas that uses Medicare eligibility rules (i.e. … Continue reading →

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Are health insurance co-pays actually too high? New insights on “Behavioral Hazard in Health Insurance”

Posted on November 6, 2012 by

Josh Schwartzstein presented an iteresting and provocative paper today that he is writing with Katherine Baicker and Sendhil Mullainathan. They point out that since people often underutilize care (e.g. don’t always take their pills) and their underuse is pretty common for treatments … Continue reading →

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