Health insurance is potentially subject to risk selection, i.e. adverse selection on the part of consumers and cream skimming on the part of insurers. Adverse selection models predict that competitive health insurers can eschew high-risk individuals by offering contracts with low deductibles or...

Given heterogeneity in incomes and health risks, with asymmetric information in the latter, preferences over the public-private mix in health insurance and care are derived. Results concerning crowding-out in the presence of adverse selection are established. For low-risk individuals,...

A famous idea to maintain affordable health expenditures is to cut back statutory health insurance (SHI) to a basic insurance and to introduce supplementary private health insurance (PHI), permitted to cover the remaining benefits and to apply managed care mechanisms. The measure is supposed to...

This paper analyzes the impact of type of insurance, income, and reason for appointment on waiting time for an appointment and waiting time in the physician's practice in the outpatient sector. Data were obtained from a German patient survey conducted between 2007 and 2009. We differentiated...

When health plans compete under adverse selection, the competitive equilibrium set of contracts is unique. However, the allocation of these contracts among health plans is undetermined. We show that three health plans suffice to sustain an equilibrium where each health plan offers a single...

We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine private health insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider a purely private system or a system in which private insurance supplements a public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately funded health...

In the backdrop of the low level of health insurance coverage in India, this study examines the determinants of the scaling-up process of health insurance by analyzing the rational behaviour of an insurance agent facing a trade-off between selling 'health insurance' and 'other forms of...

We study a health-insurance market where individuals are o.ered coverage against both medical expenditures and losses in income. Individuals vary in their level of innate ability. If there is private information about the probability of illness and an individual’s innate ability is su.ciently...

Micro data from a dental insurance natural experiment is used to analyze why agents opt out of insurance. The purpose is to relate the dropout decision to new information on risk, acquired by the policy holder and the insurer. The results show that agents tend to leave the insurance when...

The empirical evidence of adverse selection in insurance markets is mixed. The problem in assessing the extent of adverse selection is that private information, on which agents act, is generally unobservable to the researcher, which makes it difficult to distinguish between adverse selection and...