One of the major social policy issues facing the U.S. in the first decade of the 21st century is the large number of Americans lacking health insurance. This article surveys the major economic issues around covering the uninsured. I review the facts on insurance coverage and the nature of the...

Health insurance in the United States for the working age population has traditionally been provided in the form of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI). If employers offered ESHI to their employees, they also typically extended coverage to their spouse and dependents. Provisions in the...

This study examines the effect of a Medicaid disenrollment on employment, sources of health insurance coverage, health, and health care utilization of childless adults using longitudinal data from the 2004 Panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. From July through September 2005,...

Some states that have not adopted the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions have stated concerns that the expansions may impair access to care and utilization for those who are already insured. We investigate such negative spillovers using a large panel of Medicare beneficiaries. Across...

A large body of research documents that the 2010 dependent coverage mandate of the Affordable Care Act was responsible for significantly increasing health insurance coverage among young adults. No prior research has examined whether sexual minority young adults also benefitted from the dependent...

This paper reviews the issues around and impacts of the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance. After reviewing the arguments for and against this policy, I present micro-simulation evidence on the federal revenue, insurance coverage, and distributional impacts of various reforms to the...

This paper illustrates the impact of moral hazard for estimating relative rates of underinsurance and to present an adjustment method to correct for this source of bias. Individuals or households are often classified as underinsured if out-of-pocket spending on medical care relative to income...

The central role that employers play in financing health care is a distinctive feature of the U.S. health care system, and the provision of health insurance through the workplace has important implications well beyond its role as source of health care financing. In this paper, we consider the...

Subsidies for health insurance for chronically ill, high-cost individuals may increase coverage in the broader population by improving the functioning of insurance markets. In this paper, we assess an historical example of a policy intervention of this sort, the extension of Medicare to the...

Few studies have addressed how use of care may vary over the course of an episode of being uninsured or across uninsured episodes of varying duration. This research models the probability that an uninsured individual has (a) any medical expenditures or charges, and (b) any office-based visit...