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Newsletter
How Health Insurance Improves Financial Health
Low-income Americans who became eligible to enroll in Medicaid due to the Affordable Care Act saw their medical debt cut in half.
Working Paper
Health Shocks, Health Insurance, Human Capital, and the Dynamics of Earnings and Health
We specify and calibrate a life-cycle model of labor supply and savings incorporating health shocks and medical treatment decisions. Our model features endogenous wage formation via human capital accumulation, employer-sponsored health insurance, and means-tested social insurance. We use the model to study the effects of health shocks on health, labor supply and earnings, and to assess how health shocks contribute to earnings inequality. We also simulate provision of public insurance to agents who lack employer-sponsored insurance. The public insurance program substantially increases medical ...
Working Paper
Advertising and Risk Selection in Health Insurance Markets
We study impacts of advertising as a channel of risk selection in Medicare Advantage. We show evidence that both mass and direct mail advertising are targeted to achieve risk selection. We develop and estimate an equilibrium model of Medicare Advantage with advertising to understand its equilibrium impacts. We find that advertising attracts the healthy more than the unhealthy. Moreover, shutting down advertising increases premiums by up to 40% for insurers that advertised by worsening their risk pools, which further reduces the demand of the unhealthy. We argue that risk selection may make ...
Working Paper
Health-care reform or labor market reform? A quantitative analysis of the affordable care act
An equilibrium model with firm and worker heterogeneity is constructed to analyze labor market and welfare implications of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The authors? model implies a significant reduction in the uninsured rate from 22.6 percent to 5.6 percent. The model predicts a moderate positive welfare gain from the ACA because of the redistribution of income through health insurance subsidies at the exchange as well as the Medicaid expansion. About 2.1 million more part-time jobs are created under the ACA at the expense of ...
Newsletter
Medicaid Expansion and the Affordable Care Act: A Fiscal Checkup
On April 4, 2016, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Civic Federation held a conference to examine how states are lowering the ranks of the uninsured under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)?by expanding Medicaid and through other strategies. The conference also looked at the ACA?s impact on delivering health care to traditionally underserved populations.
Working Paper
The effect of ending the pandemic-related mandate of continuous Medicaid coverage on health insurance coverage
The Medicaid continuous enrollment provision, which ensured uninterrupted coverage for beneficiaries during the COVID-19 pandemic, was ended in March 2023. This unwinding process has led to large-scale Medicaid disenrollments, as states resumed their standard renewal process to evaluate enrolled individuals' eligibility status. Our analysis investigates whether resumption of states' renewal process has led to an increase in the risk of becoming uninsured for adults aged under 65 and affected their household economic well-being. Using state-month variation in the timing of the first round of ...
Working Paper
Equilibrium Labor Market Search and Health Insurance Reform
We present and empirically implement an equilibrium labor market search model where risk averse workers facing medical expenditure shocks are matched with firms making health insurance coverage decisions. Our model delivers a rich set of predictions that can account for a wide variety of phenomenon observed in the data including the correlations among firm sizes, wages, health insurance offering rates, turnover rates and workers? health compositions. We estimate our model by Generalized Method of Moments using a combination of micro datasets including Survey of Income and Program ...
Report
Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice
We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to explain the observed variation in health and mortality delta implied by the ownership of life insurance, annuities including private pensions, and long-term care insurance in the Health and Retirement Study. For the median household aged 51 to 57, the lifetime welfare cost of market incompleteness and ...
Working Paper
Shedding Light on Survey Accuracy—A Comparison between SHED and Census Bureau Survey Results
The annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) receives substantial research attention for topics related to household finances and economic well-being. To assess the reliability of data from the SHED, we compare aggregate statistics from the SHED with prominent, nationally representative surveys that use different survey designs, sample methodologies, and interview modes. Specifically, we compare recent statistics from the SHED with similar questions in U.S. Census Bureau surveys, including the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Community Survey (ACS). ...
Working Paper
Health-care reform or labor market reform? a quantitative analysis of the Affordable Care Act
An equilibrium model with ?rm and worker heterogeneity is constructed to analyze labor market and welfare implications of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Our model implies a signi?cant reduction in the uninsured rate from 22.6 percent to 5.6 percent. {{p}} The model predicts a moderate positive welfare gain from the ACA, due to redistribution of income through Health Insurance Subsidies at the Exchange as well as Medicaid expansion. About 2.1 million more part-time jobs are created under the ACA, in expense of 1.6 million full-time jobs, mainly because the link between ...