Individual moral hazard engendered by health insurance and monopolistic production are both typical phenomena of drug markets. We develop a simple model containing these two elements and evaluate the market equilibrium on the basis of consumer and social welfare. The consumer welfare criterion...

There is a growing interest in cross-border medical care and its comparative advantages. In addition, medical care can be defined as a local assurance good. Little research is being carried out in this field. This paper discusses the individual considerations for medical treatment offered at...

One of the main features of health insurance is moral hazard, as defined by Pauly (1968); people face incentives for excess utilization of medical care since they do not pay the full marginal cost for provision. To mitigate the moral hazard problem, a coinsurance can be included in the insurance...

This paper investigates the topping-up scheme in health insurance when both public and private firms use linear contracts. First, the case with identical consumers is analyzed. The optimal public coverage is derived both when the firms play simultaneously and when they play sequentially. In the...

We compare the alternative approaches for regulating genetic information in the health insurance market when prevention measures are available. In the model, firms offer insurance contracts to consumers who are initially uninformed of their risk type but can obtain such information by performing...

In many markets insurers are barred from price discrimination based on con- sumer characteristics like age, gender, and medical history. In this paper, I build on a recent literature to show why such policies are inefficient if consumers differ in their willingness-to-pay for insurance...

Conventional theory holds that moral hazard - the additional health care purchased as a result of becoming insured - is an opportunistic price response and is welfare-decreasing because the value of the additional health care purchased is less than its costs. The theory of the demand for health...

This paper presents theory that an important source of value is missing from conventional theory of the demand for health insurance, namely, the effect of the transfer of income (from those who purchase insurance and remain healthy to those who purchase insurance and become ill) on purchases of...

The U.S. tax policy on health insurance favors only those offered a group insurance through their employers. This policy is highly regressive since the subsidy takes the form of deductions from the progressive tax system. The paper investigates alternatives to the current policy. We find that...