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The Burden Of Deciding For Yourself: The Disutility Caused By Out-Of-Pocket Healthcare Spending, Christopher Robertson, David Yokum
The Burden Of Deciding For Yourself: The Disutility Caused By Out-Of-Pocket Healthcare Spending, Christopher Robertson, David Yokum
Faculty Scholarship
As part of a larger "consumer-directed healthcare movement," cost-sharing mechanisms, such as copays and deductibles, cause patients to pay out of pocket for a portion of the costs of the healthcare they consume. Cost sharing is intended to reduce costs by changing consumption behavior, and it has been shown to be an effective though incomplete solution to the problem of unsustainable cost growth. It is controversial nonetheless. This Essay distinguishes three different normative problems with cost sharing (including underinsurance, deterrence of high-value care, and a tax on sickness), which can all be fixed through more precision in the design of …
Health Insurance Is Dead; Long Live Health Insurance, Wendy K. Mariner
Health Insurance Is Dead; Long Live Health Insurance, Wendy K. Mariner
Faculty Scholarship
Today, health insurance is no longer simply a class of insurance that covers risks to health, and it has not been so for many years. Health insurance has become a unique form of insurance — a mechanism to pay for healthcare that uses risk spreading as one of several pricing methods. The Affordable Care Act builds on this important payment function to create a complex social insurance system to finance healthcare for (almost) everyone. This article examines how the ACA draws on various conceptions of insurance to produce a quasi-social insurance system. This system poses new challenges to laws governing …