The Extended Medicare Safety Net (EMSN) in Australia was designed to provide financial assistance to patients with high out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for medical treatment. The EMSN works on a calendar year basis. Once a patient incurs a specified amount of OOP costs, the EMSN provides additional...

We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

This paper looks into the search behavior of consumers in the market for health insurance contracts. We consider the recent health insurance reform in The Netherlands, where a private-public mix of insurance provision was replaced by a system based on managed competition. Although all insurers...

This paper empirically assesses the selection effects and determinants of the demand for supple-mental health insurance that covers hospital and dental benefits in Germany. Our representative dataset provides doctor-diagnosed indicators of the individual's health status, risk attitude, demand...

Rwanda is among the few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the developing approaching universal health insurance coverage. To date, over 90 per cent of the population are enrolled in the Mutuelles de Santé - a system that started off from a number of stand-alone community based health...

We investigate two determinants of the price sensitivity of health plan demand: the size of the choice set and the salience of premium differences. Using variation in both features in the German Social Health Insurance (SHI) and information on health plan switches of retirees in the German Socio...

With increasing burden of chronic diseases in India and the consequent increase in private expenditure on health care, the inability of poor households to meet healthcare cost is leading to increasing impoverishment on account of unanticipated health shocks. In the absence of an adequate and an...

Social protection systems in developing countries are typically composed of a bundle of benefits, the major ones being health insurance and pensions. Benefit bundling may increase informality and decrease welfare. Indeed, if some of the benefits are valued at substantially less than their cost,...

We study age-rating restrictions in the health insurance marketplaces introduced by the Affordable Care Act. Because most buyers are subsidized, although age-rating restrictions affect pre-subsidy premiums, participation is primarily driven by subsidy generosity rather than pricing decisions....

The Affordable Care Act's medical loss ratio (MLR) provisions require that health insurers spend a minimum percentage of premiums on medical costs, thereby limiting administrative costs and profits. Analyses of annual MLR changes indicate that plans both below and above the minimum MLR manage...