Employer Incentives and Distortions in Health Insurance Design: Implications for Welfare and Costs
研究了雇主在设计健康保险供应商网络时的激励，发现雇主过度提供宽网络，偏向年长员工和竞争较少地区的员工，调整网络可提升福利且影响小。
This paper studies employer incentives in designing health insurance provider networks and whether observed offerings reflect preferences that are aligned with employees. I estimate a model of supply and demand where I endogenize employer health plan offerings with respect to hospital and physician networks. I find that employers “overprovide” broad networks by overweighting the preferences of certain employees, specifically older workers and those in regions with less provider competition, over the preferences of the average employee household. Shifting employers toward offering different provider networks in different geographic markets could yield substantial gains to surplus, with minimal distributional or selection effects.