Price-Linked Subsidies and Imperfect Competition in Health Insurance
研究了健康保险补贴与市场价格挂钩的政策效果，发现这种补贴方式会削弱竞争、推高价格，且在不完全竞争市场中影响更大。
Policymakers subsidizing health insurance often face uncertainty about future market prices. We study the implications of one policy response: linking subsidies to prices to target a given postsubsidy premium. We show that these price-linked subsidies weaken competition, raising prices for the government and/or consumers. However, price-linking also ties subsidies to health care cost shocks, which may be desirable. Evaluating this tradeoff empirically, using a model estimated with Massachusetts insurance exchange data, we find that price-linking increases prices 1–6 percent, and much more in less competitive markets. For cost uncertainty reasonable in a mature market, these losses outweigh the benefits of price-linking.