Aspects of Health Reform Contributions from the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured

From 2001 to 2008, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured (ERIU), housed at the University of Michigan. The goals of ERIU were to increase, diversify, and improve the quality and quantity of economics research on the uninsured, and to translate that research into resources useful to policymakers, policy analysts, researchers, and the media. This article introduces a set of papers, commissioned by the ERIU, discussing four aspects of health reform: efficiency, equity, adverse selection, and moral hazard—any change in behavior induced by the presence of insurance. Catherine McLaughlin, a senior fellow at Mathematica and director of the firm’s Ann Arbor office, was the director of ERIU.