Several aspects of the life insurance pricing process depend on the subjective attitude of both the agents, insurer and insured. The insurer chooses the population sector, that may be interested in the offered protection and the prevailing interest between coverage and investment. On one side, prudence has to characterize the management due to the social role and has to be inserted explicitly i...

A committee of physicians sets prices for physician services in Medicare. We investigate whether the composition of this committee leads to prices biased in favor of its members. We find evidence of regulatory capture: increasing a measure of affiliation between the committee and proposers by one standard deviation increases prices by 10%. We then evaluate the effect of affiliation on the quali...

Advising patients when to drive after surgery is a common practice which gynaecologists need to do on a regular basis as a part of their duty to patients. We carried out a literature search regarding advice given on driving after gynaecological surgical procedures, and found no study or research on this area. We then carried out a questionnaire survey of 99 gynaecologists in Northern Ireland. W...

Many insurers participating in the new insurance exchanges are controlling costs by offering plans with narrow provider networks. Proposed regulations would promote network adequacy, but a pro-provider stance may not be inherently pro-consumer or even pro-patient.

This paper takes a different approach to estimating demand for medical care that uses the negotiated prices between insurers and providers as an instrument. The instrument is viewed as a textbook "cost shifting" instrument that impacts plan offerings, but is unobserved by consumers. The paper finds a price elasticity of demand of around -0.20, matching the elasticity found in the RAND Health In...

Two contrasting hypotheses about what determines remittances sent by Dominican migrants to their rural parents in the Sierra are tested: (a) an insurance contract taken by parents with their migrant children and (b) an investment by migrants in potential bequests. Results show that the reason to remit is affected by destination (U.S. vs. cities in the Dominican Republic), gender, and household ...

Telehealth is becoming mainstream in the U.S., as more consumers, employers, hospital systems, and even insurers adopt the technology. The authors explore the challenges of regulation, reimbursement, and licensing as the modality evolves.

Insurance market reforms face the key challenge of addressing the threat that risk selection poses to the availability, of stable, high-value insurance policies that provide long-term risk protection. Many of the strategies in use today fail to address this breakdown in risk pooling, and some even exacerbate it. Flexible risk adjustment schemes are a promising avenue for promoting market stabil...