Objective
To assess three possible determinants of individuals' response in their private insurance purchases to the availability of the Partnership for Long‐Term Care (PLTC) insurance program: ...bequest motives, financial literacy, and program awareness.
Data Sources
The health and retirement study (HRS) merged with data on states' implementation of the PLTC program.
Study Design
Individual‐level decision on private long‐term care insurance is regressed on whether the PLTC program is being implemented for a given state‐year, asset dummies, policy determinant variable, two‐way and three‐way interactions of these variables, and other controls, using fixed effects panel regression.
Data Extraction Methods
Analysis used a sample between 50 and 69 years of age from 2002 to 2010, resulting in 12,695 unique individuals with a total of 39,151 observations.
Principal Findings
We find mild evidence that intent to bequest influences individual purchase of insurance. We also find that program awareness is necessary for response, while financial literacy notably increases responsiveness.
Conclusions
Increasing response to the PLTC program among the middle class (the stated target group) requires increased efforts to create awareness of the program's existence and increased education about the program's benefits, and more generally, about long‐term care risks and needs.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many mental health care services have been shifted from face-to-face to virtual interactions. Several health policy changes have influenced telehealth uptake during ...this time, including changes in technology, Internet connectivity, prescriptions, and reimbursement for services. These changes have been implemented for the duration of the pandemic, and it is unclear if all, some, or none of these new or amended policies will be retained after the pandemic has ended. Accordingly, in the wake of changing policies, mental health care providers will need to make decisions about the future of their telehealth programs. This article briefly reviews telehealth policy changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlights what providers should consider for future delivery and implementation of their telehealth programs.
ABSTRACT
Insurance pricing is subject to stricter regulation in some states than others. This cross-sectional variation, coupled with the occurrence of staggered deregulation in several states, ...enables a powerful test of the political cost hypothesis that managers manipulate accruals to mitigate adverse effects of rate regulation. We show that insurers understate their loss reserve accruals in more regulated regimes, a finding that contrasts with most prior studies documenting expense-increasing accruals in regulatory pricing settings like utilities. We theorize and find evidence that regulator-enabled cartel-like collective rate making leads to premiums being higher than the competitive level. Our results are consistent with accounting manipulation being used to justify deviating from these high rates and showcase a role for accounting in cartel enforcement.
JEL Classifications: M41; G18; G22; G32.
This paper examines the design of affirmative and silent coverage in view of the cyber risks in traditional insurance policies for select product lines on the German market. Given the novelty and ...complexity of the topic and the insufficient coverage in the literature, we use two different sources. We analysed the general insurance terms and conditions of different traditional insurance lines using Mayring’s qualitative content analysis. Also, we conducted interviews with experts from the German insurance industry to evaluate how insurers understand their silent cyber exposures, and what measures they take to deal with this new exposure. The study shows a considerable cyber liability risk potential for insurers in the considered insurance lines. This arises from the affirmative as well as silent cover inclusions and exclusions for cyber risks, which result from imprecise wordings of insurance clauses and insufficient descriptions of the contractually specified scope of the insurance coverage.
This paper shows that selection incentives in downstream markets distort upstream prices. It is possible for inputs to be priced above the value that the good has for final consumers. We apply this ...idea to pharmaceutical companies selling drugs to a health insurance market with selection problems. We specify the conditions under which drugs are sold at prices exceeding treatment value. Another feature of the model is an excessive private incentive to reduce market size, e.g. in the form of personalized medicine.
We study public policies designed to improve access and reduce costs for in vitro fertilization (IVF). High out-of-pocket prices can deter potential patients from IVF, while active patients have an ...incentive to risk costly high-order pregnancies to improve their odds of treatment success. We analyze IVF’s rich choice structure by estimating a dynamic model of patients’ choices within and across treatments. Policy simulations show that insurance mandates for treatment or hard limits on treatment aggressiveness can improve access or costs, but not both. Insurance plus price-based incentives against risky treatment, however, can together improve patient welfare and reduce medical costs.
The goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to achieve nearly universal health insurance covera ge through a combination of mandates, subsidies, marketplaces, and Medicaid expansions, most of which ...took effect in 2014. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine the impacts of the ACA on health care access, risky health behaviors, and self-assessed health after two years. We estimate difference-in-difference-in-differences models that exploit variation in treatment intensity from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and pre-ACA uninsured rates. Results suggest that the ACA led to sizeable improvements in access to health care in both Medicaid expansion and nonexpansion states, with the gains being larger in expansion states along some dimensions. However, we do not find clear effects on risky behaviors or self-assessed health.
Prior to the Affordable Care Act, the majority of states in the U.S. had already implemented state laws that extended the age that young adults could enroll as dependents on their parent's ...employer-based health insurance plans. Because of the fundamental link between health insurance and employment in the U.S., such policies may effect the labor supply decisions of young adults. Although the interaction between labor supply and health insurance has been extensively studied for other subpopulations, little is known about the role of health insurance in the labor supply decisions of young adults. I use the variation from the implementation and changes in state policies that expanded dependent health insurance coverage to examine how young adults adjusted their labor supply when they were able to be covered as a dependent on their parent's plan. I find that these state mandates led to a decrease in labor supply on the intensive margin.
Optimal health insurance Phelps, Charles E.
The Journal of risk and insurance,
March 2023, Letnik:
90, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
I formulate expected‐utility‐maximizing models for health insurance with a single optimal coinsurance (C*) and (separately) a single optimal deductible (D*). While so‐doing, I formalize Nyman's ...challenge to standard welfare‐loss models, clarifying when and by how much this alters unadjusted models. Using MEPS‐calibrated lognormal distributions and incorporating skewness and kurtosis measures of financial risk, I show how C* shifts as various economic parameters change. For reasonable parameter values, C* < 0.1, much lower than variance‐only estimates would conclude. Omitting higher‐order risk parameters importantly understates risk and hence understates optimal insurance coverage. I separately develop methods to determine D*, showing that it is approximately a fixed percentage of income that falls as the distribution of financial risks rise. This finding contrasts with existing US public policy regarding high‐deductible health plans, which employ fixed deductibles, independent of income.
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