Author: Alice Monica ZawackiPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Essays on Health Care Services and Insurance Coverage for Older Persons
Author: Alice Monica ZawackiPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Essays on Long-term Care Insurance
Author: Angie AhmadiPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Long-term care insurance
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation focuses on long-term care (LTC) in old age and the low ownership of private long-term care insurance (LTCI). Older adults in the US face significant risk of needing long-term care services. Despite the risk, most Americans never attempt to insure against it, and those who do tend to apply late in life when they are likely to be rejected. The first essay in this dissertation builds a quantitative equilibrium model to study consumers' decision about when to buy LTCI in the presence of uninsurability risk. The model evaluates how much of the delay in purchase can be explained by risk misperceptions. I formulate the problem as a three-period model where consumers may buy insurance in a competitive market based on their observable risk characteristics during the first two periods in order to insure against nursing home risk in the third period. I estimate the model using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The model successfully reproduces the low ownership rates and timing of purchase across all income quintiles. I find that risk misperceptions lead to 42% lower than optimal purchase rate, and cause 29% of early buyers to delay their purchase. The sub-optimal behavior is particularly pronounced among the middle-income consumers. The second essay studies the patterns of LTC risk and LTCI purchase across race and ethnicity in the US. By 2050, the share of Blacks and Hispanics in the over-85 population is expected to increase to 40%. A better understanding of risk and insurance across different segments of the aging population is particularly important, given this increasing racial heterogeneity in older adults. Using the HRS, this chapter studies racial disparities in late-in-life health outcomes and estimates the risk of having a nursing home stay over lifetime across race and ethnicity. It finds that Blacks and Hispanics have a lower risk of entering a nursing home than Whites. The paper also examines differences in the likelihood of LTCI purchase across different racial and ethnic groups. The findings suggest that once demographic, socioeconomic, and family characteristics are accounted for, non-Whites are not less likely to buy insurance.
Essays on Healthcare, Long-term Care and Retirement
Author: Aikaterini GousiaPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical economics
Languages : en
Pages : 141
Book Description
This thesis focuses on three distinct topics around healthcare and ageing. The first chapter assess the effectiveness of the current regime that regulates the entry and geographical distribution of pharmacies in Italy. Using a structural model from the recent literature on entry I find that the public interest view is not supported in the Italian case. Alternative policies that combine entry deregulation and markup reduction are found to achieve the same if not better geographical coverage by pharmacies, higher supply of pharmaceutical services, entry by new pharmacists and important government savings. The second chapter seeks to see whether financial literacy can be a factor that affects demand for private long-term care insurance. Using detailed data from the Health and Retirement Study I construct two comprehensive indices for financial literacy that capture various aspects and degrees of financial skills and knowledge. Using an instrumental variables approach I find that those with higher financial literacy are more likely to own private long-term care insurance. The third chapter investigates the effect of gradual retirement on a variety of health outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity approach I find that partial retirement has a preserving health effect in old age contrary to full time work that is found to deteriorate health. The effect of partial retirement on health is in fact larger in magnitude, suggesting that the health effects of working are non linear in old age.
Essays on Long-term Care and Health Insurance
Author: Christopher Karl Ludwig SchreckenbergerPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Health insurance
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Two Essays on Long-term Care Insurance
Author: Yanling GeEssays on Health Insurance, Household Liquidity, and the Demand for Medical Care
Author: Matthew John NiedzwieckiPublisher:
ISBN: 9781303220807
Category : Health insurance
Languages : en
Pages : 109
Book Description
My dissertation uses empirical methods to investigate the determinants of medical care demand and to understand how government action affects population health. The first chapter looks at a recent health insurance expansion in the state of Massachusetts and finds that, in the short run, the newly insured seek more hospital care. In the long run, as the supply of primary care physicians expands, care may shift to more efficient points of services. The second and third chapters examine the effect of cash liquidity on the demand for medical care and health insurance. I find liquidity to play an important role in determining the timing of health investments and that the uninsured are more sensitive to liquidity constraints, likely because they face higher prices. Cash-on hand is also shown to be an important fact in maintaining continuous private health insurance coverage.
Essays in the Economics of Healthcare and Health Insurance
Author: Bradley Thomas HowellsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
This dissertation contributes in two distinct ways to our understanding of the economics of healthcare and health insurance. Chapter 2 studies the decision process by which physicians allocate medical treatments to heart attack patients. The approach provides insight into the sources of well documented, but unexplained, disparities across demographic dimensions in health care utilization rates and health outcomes. In the model medical providers know how treatment alternatives affect patient-specific probabilities of three final health outcomes - death, readmission, and survival without readmission - and assign implicit values to each outcome that vary by patient age. The model does well in explaining the joint variation in treatments and outcomes, especially when including unobserved patient heterogeneity. Using decomposition methods, I show that a substantial fraction of gender differences in the use of intensive treatment is explained by a combination of the differences in the relative efficacy of treatment options for female patients, and the smaller implicit weight given to final outcomes of older patients. Chapter 3 explores how reforms to cash-assistance welfare programs in the United States in the mid 1990s acted as a structural shift in the health insurance and employment environment of lower income single mothers and find there may have been unintended consequences for this population's access to health insurance. With a more structured approach than is common in the literature, I estimate short and long run employment and insurance dynamics before and after the reforms. I show that reform reduced use of cash-assistance and increased the probability of employment, but created a less stable employment and health insurance environment. After the reform low income single mothers were less likely to retain the same employment and insurance status over a four month period. Although policy did not target Medicaid eligibility, individuals were less likely to retain Medicaid enrollment over the short and longer run after reform.
The Public-private Health Care State
Author: Rosemary A. StevensPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351475800
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
The distinctive mixing and continuous remixing of public and private roles is a defining feature of health care in the United States. The Public-Private Health Care State explores the interweaving of public and private enterprise in health care in the United States as a basis for thinking about health care in terms of its history and its continuing evolution today. Historian and policy analyst Rosemary Stevens has selected and edited seventeen essays from both her published and unpublished work to illustrate continuing themes, such as: the flexible meanings of the terms public and private, and how useful their ambiguity has been and is; the role of ideology as ratifying rather than preordaining change; and the common behavior of public leaders and corporate entities in the face of fiscal opportunity. The topics--covering the period of 1870 through the twenty-first century--represent Stevens' research interests in hospital history and policy, the medical profession, government policy, and paying for health care. The volume also considers her involvement with policy questions, which include health services research, health maintenance organizations, and physician workforce policy. Section I demonstrates the long history of state government involvement with private not-for-profit hospitals from the 1870s through the 1930s. Section II examines the federal role in health care from the 1920s through the 1970s, including the establishment of veterans' hospitals and the implementation of Medicaid. Section III shows how shifting governmental roles require constantly changing organizing rhetoric, whether for inventing a federal role for health services research and HMOs, regionalization in the 1970s, or defining civil rights and equity as mobilizing vehicles in the 1980s. Section IV examines growing concerns from the 1970s through the present about the traditional public role of the largely private medical profession. Section V returns to the ambiguous public-priv
Two Essays on Price Limits and One Essay on Health Insurance
Author: Shawn McFarlandPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The first two essays study the special quote (SQ) and limit up-limit down (LULD) rules. These rules are short duration price limits rules on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (SQ) and US stock exchanges (LULD). We present a novel research design where we create pseudo-event samples to test stock market behavior in the absence of these rules. The first essay examines price limit effects on delayed price discovery and the magnet effect. We find that neither SQ nor LULD delay price discovery. SQ exhibits evidence of the magnet effect at the upper price limit while LULD has no magnet effect. The second essay focuses on volatility spillover following a price limit event and microstructure noise during flash crashes. Consistent with previous findings regarding daily static price limits, we find little evidence that either SQ or LULD calm market volatility. Also, we find little evidence that LULD reduces intraday volatility during periods of extreme volatility such as flash crashes. The third essay strives to develop a more efficient, lower-cost health insurance/underwriting system. We divide healthcare coverage into three tiers. Tier 1 consists of low severity healthcare claims that occur regularly for essentially all people. Tier 2 covers relatively lower frequency and higher cost healthcare claims that present lower, more predictable underwriting risk and rarely involves prolonged, year to year, underwriting risks. Tier 3 involves catastrophic low frequency but high severity healthcare underwriting risks that may require larger volume insurers to achieve diversification through a more stable distribution of benefits. Tier 3 claims often result in the long term and expensive future healthcare needs risks often terminating with the death of the insured. We show empirically that annual health care expense is a function of claim frequency and claim severity. Further, we show that claim frequency and claim severity are interrelated and that their covariant relation is non-homogeneous across the entire distribution of health care claims. Finally, we show that by segmenting health care insurance underwriting based on these three tiers, cumulative health insurance premiums are reduced. We propose policy recommendations to address social interests including affordable care and universal coverage..
Author: Daifeng He