Public Health Insurance and Private Savings

Public Health Insurance and Private Savings

Recent theoretical work suggests that means and asset-tested social insurance programs can explain the low savings of lower income households in the U.S. We assess the validity of this hypothesis by investigating the effect of Medicaid, the health insurance program for low income women and children, on savings behavior. We do so using data on asset holdings from the Survey of Income and Program...

Public Pension Reforms and Private Savings

The 1999 reforms to the Korea National Pension Scheme resulted in a unique situation, in which those who were insured by the pension scheme and those who were uninsured coexisted. Exploiting this situation, this paper evaluates the effect of public pension on private savings. The estimation results show that the average effect is close to zero. Households with low or very high saving rates were...

Changing Nature of Public and Private Health Insurance

While approximately 42 million Americans lack health insurance coverage (Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, 2001), the vast majority of Americans are covered for their health care expenditures by a complicated array of public and private programs. Private health insurance coverage grew rapidly during World War II as employers provided coverage as a fringe benefit to their employee...

Public versus Private: A Dynamic Model of Health Insurance Choice∗

In order to improve the health status of their populations, many countries have turned to a mix of both public and private health insurance plans. There is concern, however, that the private insurance market may cover the healthier in the population, leading to adverse selection for public insurance programs. This paper presents a model of insurance choice for the case of Chile, where workers m...

Public-private partnerships and insurance regulation.