What Does (Formal) Health Insurance Do, and For Whom? / Amy Finkelstein, Neale Mahoney, Matthew J. Notowidigdo.

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Finkelstein, Amy

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w23718.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: Health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. But because the nominally uninsured pay only a small share of their medical expenses, health insurance also provides substantial transfers to non-recipient 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 they deliver to providers of uncompensated care.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w23718 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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August 2017.

Health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. But because the nominally uninsured pay only a small share of their medical expenses, health insurance also provides substantial transfers to non-recipient 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 they deliver to providers of uncompensated care.