Health Insurance: A Primer

Health Insurance : A Primer Updated February 3 , 2005

The Use of Statistical Sampling in Auditing Health-Care Insurance Claim Payments

This paper is a primer on the practice of designing, selecting, and making inferences on a statistical sample, where the goal is to estimate the magnitude of error in a book value total. Although the concepts and syntax are presented through the lens of an audit of health-care insurance claim payments, they generalize to other contexts. After presenting the fundamental measures of uncertainty t...

A Medicaid primer

By far the largest portion of the poor—nearly 43 percent—are covered through Medicaid. Not quite 16 percent have private coverage or are insured through the military’s program of coverage, CHAMPUS (Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services). Another 12.5 percent are covered through Medicare. Nearly 29 percent have no insurance coverage at all. Among the near-poor, the propor...

Could Flood Insurance be Privatised in the United States? A Primer

Since 1968, homeowners’ flood insurance in the United States has been mainly provided through the federally-run National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 raises the possibility of moving coverage to the private sector, assuming the market can price this risk effectively and that premiums reflect risk. This paper provides the first large-scale quantification...

Understanding medical malpractice insurance: a primer.

As the policy debate over the medical malpractice insurance crisis continues, dueling claims about its causes and suggestions for policy solutions have highlighted the need for a better understanding of how medical malpractice insurance works, why premiums change and what can be done about it. This primer on malpractice insurance discusses these issues and also analyzes the causes of and potent...