Recycling fuel subsidies as health subsidies

Recycling fuel subsidies as health subsidies.

Fossil fuel subsidies and health.

In calling for a switch of fossil fuel subsidies to funding of universal health coverage, Vinay Gupta and colleagues (June, 2015) miss two health-relevant issues: all fossil fuels are not the same and all subsidies are not the same. Liquefi ed petroleum gas (LPG) has major, direct health advantages in household cooking in countries of low and middle income, its primary use. Indeed, the Global B...

The Environmental Cost of Global Fuel Subsidies

Despite increasing calls for reform many countries continue to provide subsidies for gasoline and diesel. This paper quantifies the external costs from global fuel subsidies using the latest available data and estimates from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Under preferred assumptions about supply and demand elasticities, current subsidies cause $44 billion in external costs annu...

Transitional subsidies for health insurance coverage.

Losing or leaving a job often means losing health insurance. Of all those who have lost private insurance and become uninsured, one-third have either left or lost a job in the recent past. Continuation of coverage subsidies under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) of 1985 mitigate only slightly this problem due to the high costs of the group coverage that must be purchas...

Price-Linked Subsidies and Health Insurance Markups

Subsidies in the Affordable Care Act exchanges and other health insurance programs depend on prices set by insurers – as prices rise, so do subsidies. We show that these “price-linked” subsidies incentivize higher prices, with a magnitude that depends on how much insurance demand rises when the price of uninsurance (the mandate penalty) increases. To estimate this effect, we use two natural exp...