Health care costs in the United States have been rising faster than most other goods and services for more than 20 years. The fundamental reason for this rise in cost is unbridled demand for health care services. Demand is high because those who receive the benefits (patients) pay a relatively small portion of the cost of their health insurance. The bulk of health insurance costs are paid by em...

BACKGROUND We study the longevity and medical resource usage of a large sample of insureds aged 65 years or older drawn from a large health insurance dataset. Yearly counts of each subject's emergency room and ambulance service use and hospital admissions are made. Occurrence of mortality is also monitored. The study aims to capture the simultaneous dependence between their demand for healthcar...

introduction: the rapid increase in health costs across the world has forced governments to use insurance programs. uncontrolled costs would reduce the financial ability of insurance organizations in providing services. abuse of health insurance wastes 3-15% of the health budget annually. this study was conducted to determine cases of violating the rules and regulations of medical services insu...

Several estimators have been suggested to tackle the problem of endogenous regressors and selectivity in count regression models. They differ in the structure and the degree of parameterization of the underlying models. The estimation of health services utilization conditional on the choice of different forms of health insurance provides a classical example of such problems. In Switzerland, bas...

In 2006, Massachusetts passed legislation that broadened access to health insurance for its residents. The percentage of the state population that had health insurance (obtained through either private insurance or publicly funded programs) subsequently increased, reaching 97% in 2011, leaving only 3% uninsured, compared with approximately 9%-20% uninsured among nonelderly residents in 2006. Giv...

The paper examines the influence of health savings accounts (HSAs) on optimal savings, insurance demand and prevention effort over the course of a lifetime. This paper adds to the literature by investigating HSAs as both a form of insurance and as saving vehicle in an expected utility framework. Assuming no regulatory constraints on the deductible, we show that individuals voluntarily choose a ...

Crop insurance is a risk management tool with the potential of dealing with risk more efficiently, the study uses a dichotomous contingent valuation method to elicit the willingness to pay for crop insurance among cereal farmers in the Eastern region of Ghana. The study employed descriptive statistical techniques to analyse primary data obtained from 208 sampled farmers in the region. Approxima...

INTRODUCTION Limited data exist on insured patients who receive care at publically funded sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinics, despite having access to a primary care provider. In this analysis, we compare patients with and without health insurance who sought services at City Clinic, the San Francisco municipal STD clinic. METHODS We analyzed San Francisco City Clinic patients between ...