Incentive-Compatible Guaranteed Renewable Health Insurance

Multi-period theoretical models of renewable insurance display front-loaded premium schedules that both cover lifetime total claims of low-risk and high-risk individuals and provide an incentive for those who remain low-risk to continue to purchase the policy. In practice, however, an age profile of premiums that decreases with age might result in relatively high premiums for younger individuals which they may consider unaffordable. In this paper, we use medical expenditure data to estimate an optimal competitive age-based premium schedule for a benchmark renewable health insurance policy. We find that the amount of prepayment by younger individuals that would be necessary to cover future claims is mitigated by three factors: high-risk individuals will either recover or die, low-risk expected expense increases with age, and the likelihood of developing a high-risk condition increases with age. Although medical cost growth over time increases the amount of prepayment necessary, the resulting optimal premium path generally increases with age. We also find that actual premium paths exhibited by purchasers of individual insurance with guaranteed renewability is close to the optimal schedule we estimate. Finally, we examine consumers' gain in expected utility associated with the guaranteed renewability feature.

Understanding contextual interactions to design navigational context-aware applications

Context-aware technology has stimulated rigorous research into novel ways to support people in a wide range of tasks and situations. However, the effectiveness of these technologies will ultimately be dependent on the extent to which contextual interactions are understood and accounted for in their design. This study involved an investigation of contextual interactions required for route navigation. The purpose was to illustrate the heterogeneous nature of humans in interaction with their environmental context. Participants were interviewed to determine how each interacts with or use objects/information in the environment in which to navigate/orientate. Results revealed that people vary individually and collectively. Usability implications for the design of navigational context-aware applications are identified and discussed

First Do No Harm With COVID-19: Corona Collateral Damage Syndrome

Language matters and communication has consequences, sometimes unforseen.  During the Covid-19 public health emergency, public health and elected leaders messaged "Stay at Home" to encourage social distancing to reduce viral transmission. The message in combination with a widespread public fear of acquiring Covid-19 at hospital emergency rooms, resulted in a steep decline in ER visits, even for time sensitive conditions. The Corona Collateral Damage Syndrome is described. A public health messaging course correction is suggested to encourage people with emergencies to come to the emergency room for care

The Effect of State Community Rating Regulations on Premiums and Coverage in the Individual Health Insurance Market

Some states have implemented community rating regulations to limit the extent to which premiums in the individual health insurance market can vary with a person�s health status. Community rating and guaranteed issues laws were passed with hopes of increasing access to affordable insurance for people with high-risk health conditions, but there are concerns that these laws led to adverse selection. In some sense, the extent to which these regulations ultimately affected the individual market depends in large part on the degree of risk segmentation in unregulated states. In this paper, we examine the relationship between expected medical expenses, individual insurance premiums, and the likelihood of obtaining individual insurance using data from both the National Health Interview Survey and the Community Tracking Study Household Survey. We test for differences in these relationships between states with both community rating and guaranteed issue and states with no such regulations. While we find that people living in unregulated states with higher expected expense due to chronic health conditions pay modestly higher premiums and are somewhat less likely to obtain coverage, the variation between premiums and risk in unregulated individual insurance markets is far from proportional; there is considerable pooling. In regulated states, we find that there is no effect of having higher expected expense due to chronic health conditions on neither premiums nor coverage. Overall, our results suggest that the effect of regulation is to produce a slight increase in the proportion uninsured, as increases in low risk uninsureds more than offset decreases in high risk uninsureds. Community rating and guaranteed issue regulations produce only small changes in risk pooling because the extent of pooling in the absence of regulation is substantial.

The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Mark Bradley is professor of international history and the College at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on 20th century U.S. international history, the global history of human rights politics and postcolonial Southeast Asian history. Bradley is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, and Vietnam at War (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is co-editor of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (Rutgers University Press, 2001). He also serves as co-editor of the Cornell University Press book series The United States in the World. Bradley is currently completing a book that explores the place of the U.S. in the global human rights revolutions of the 20th century to be published by Cambridge University Press. He is also co-authoring a textbook on the international history of the Vietnam wars for Blackwell. Bradley has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright-Hays. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

Health Risk, Income, and Employment-Based Health Insurance

While many believe that an individual’s health plays an important role in both their willingness and ability to obtain health insurance in the employment-based setting, relatively little agreement exists on the extent to which health status affects coverage rates, particularly for those with lower incomes. In this paper, we examine the relationship between health risk and the purchase of group health insurance and whether that relationship differs by a person’s income and whether they obtain coverage in the small, medium, or large group market. Using the panel component of the 1996-2002 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we find that health risk is positively associated with private health insurance across the different markets, and that this positive relationship is stronger for low and middle income people, particularly in the large group market. Our results are consistent with the existence of adverse selection in the group market in the form of low rates of coverage among low risks due to an absence of risk rating of premiums. We conclude that pooled premiums for low risks, particularly those with low incomes, may represent a more important financial barrier to coverage in voluntary group insurance than high premiums for high risks.

Health Insurance on the Internet and the Economics of Search

This paper explores the level and dispersion of premiums paid for individual health insurance by comparing asking price' data posted on an electronic insurance exchange with survey data on premiums actually paid in the period just before the advent of electronic exchanges. The primary theoretical question is whether the pattern of differences between asking prices and transactions prices can be explained using a simple search theory. We hypothesize, following suggestions of Stigler and Rothschild, that higher risks who expect to pay higher premiums for a given policy will engage in more intensive search than lower risks, given the same distribution of asking prices. As a result, for a given distribution of asking prices, the dispersion of premiums actually paid (transactions prices) will be smaller for higher risks. Therefore, the introduction of an electronic exchange should have a larger potential influence on the dispersion and level of premiums paid for lower risks than for higher risks. We find evidence consistent with each of these hypotheses.