What Does (Formal) Health Insurance Do, and for Whom?
分析了健康保险对未参保者的健康、自付支出和医疗债务的影响,并指出保险也通过减少无偿医疗负担向非受益方转移资源,这有助于解释参保率低和保险价值评估不足的现象。
Health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. However, because the nominally uninsured pay only a small share of their medical expenses, health insurance also provides substantial transfers to nonrecipient parties who would otherwise bear the costs of providing uncompensated care to the uninsured. The prevalence of uncompensated care helps explain the limited take-up of heavily subsidized public health insurance and the evidence that many recipients value formal health insurance at substantially less than the cost to insurers of providing that coverage. The distributional implications of public subsidies for health insurance depend critically on the ultimate economic incidence of the transfers that they deliver to providers of uncompensated care.