The Affordable Care Act will extend health insurance coverage by both expanding Medicaid eligibility and offering premium subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance through state health insurance exchanges. But by definition, eligibility for these programs is sensitive to income and can change over time with fluctuating income and changes in family composition. The law specifies no ...

Efforts to enroll low-income workers in premium assistance programs are constrained by the health insurance offer rates of the firms who employ them. One solution is to target premium subsidies to small firms as well as to their low-income workers, and Massachusetts is the sole state to have tried this. Firms participating in the state’s Insurance Partnership were more likely to be self-employe...

Both adverse selection and moral hazard models predict a positive relationship between risk and insurance; yet the most common finding in empirical studies of insurance is that of a negative correlation. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between ex ante risk and private health insurance using Australian data. The institutional features of the Australian system make the effects of a...

BACKGROUND Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has emerged as a major goal for health care delivery in the post-2015 development agenda. It is viewed as a solution to health care needs in low and middle countries with growing enthusiasm at both national and global levels. Throughout the world, however, the paths of countries to UHC have differed. South Africa is currently reforming its health syste...

The scholarly literature on health care politics has generated a series of hypotheses to explain U.S. exceptionalism in health policy and to explain the adoption of national health insurance (NHI) more generally. Various cultural, institutional, and political conditions are held to make the establishment of some form of national health insurance policy more (or less) likely to occur. The litera...

The Affordable Care Act is the most fundamental legislative transformation of the US health care system in forty years. This analysis estimates that the act will provide health insurance for an additional 3.4 million people in California in 2016. This will mean that nearly 96 percent of documented residents of California under age sixty-five will be insured. Enrollment in Medi-Cal, the state's ...

In 1996, free choice of health insurers was introduced to the German social health insurance system. One objective was to increase efficiency through competition. A crucial precondition for effective competition among health insurers is that consumers search for lower-priced health insurers. We test this hypothesis by estimating the price elasticities of insurers' market shares. We use unique p...