This paper addresses the following question: Why do consumers demand guaranteed renewability in health insurance? The answer to this question has important implications for the ability of competitive health insurance markets to provide affordable health insurance for people with chronic illness....

Health insurance markets in the United States are characterized by imperfect information, complex products, and substantial search frictions. Insurance agents and brokers play a significant role in helping employers navigate these problems. However, little is known about the relation between the...

Many small firms (fewer than 50 employees) do not offer health insurance. We investigated the role of premiums in the small firm's decision to offer health insurance, using data from a 1993 survey of 2,000 small firms in Minnesota. Selectively-corrected equations were estimated to predict the...

Background: Many employers are changing their pharmacy benefit designs to contain cost increases. The objective of this study was to evaluate employee awareness of the cost-saving potential of these changes in the context of one such employer initiative. Methods: We analyzed data from a survey...

Excess demand is a pervasive feature of health care systems that use global budgets to pay for hospital care, regardless of the amount of money spent by those systems. This paper presents a theory that explains this feature of global budgets. The theory emphasizes that hospital administrators...

Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. The research in Measuring and Modeling Health...