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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Health Insurance As A Two-Part Pricing Contract, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Neeraj Sood
Health Insurance As A Two-Part Pricing Contract, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Neeraj Sood
Darius N. Lakdawalla
No abstract provided.
Health Insurance As A Two-Part Pricing Contract, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Neeraj Sood
Health Insurance As A Two-Part Pricing Contract, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Neeraj Sood
Darius N. Lakdawalla
Monopolies appear throughout medical care markets, as a result of patents, limits to the extent of the market, or the presence of unique inputs and skills. Economists typically think of such monopolies as necessary evils or even pure inefficiencies. However, in the health care industry, the deadweight costs of monopoly may be much smaller or even absent. Health insurance, frequently implemented as an ex ante premium coupled with an ex post co-payment per unit consumed, operates as a two-part pricing contract. This allows monopolists to extract consumer surplus without inefficiently constraining quantity. This view of health insurance contracts has several …
Does Medicare Benefit The Poor?, Darius Lakdawalla, Jay Bhattacharya
Does Medicare Benefit The Poor?, Darius Lakdawalla, Jay Bhattacharya
Darius N. Lakdawalla
Measuring the progressivity of age-targeted government programs is difficult because no single data set measures income and benefit use throughout life. Previous research, using zip code as a proxy for lifetime income, has found that Medicare benefits flow primarily to the most economically advantaged groups, and that the financial returns to Medicare are often higher for the rich than the poor. However, our analysis produces the starkly opposed result that Medicare is an extraordinarily progressive public program, in dollar terms or welfare terms. These new results owe themselves to our measurement of socioeconomic status as an individual’s education, rather than …