Employee Responses to Health Insurance Premium Increases

Objective: To determine the sensitivity of employees’ health insurance decisions—including the decision to not choose health maintenance organization or fee-for-service coverage—during periods of rapidly escalating healthcare costs. Study Design: A retrospective cohort study of employee plan choices at a single large firm with a “cafeteria-style” benefits plan wherein employees paid all the additional cost of purchasing more generous insurance. Methods: We modeled the probability that an employee would drop coverage or switch plans in response to employee premium increases using data from a single large US company with employees across 47 states during the 3-year period of 1989 through 1991, a time of large premium increases within and across plans. Results: Premium increases induced substantial plan switching. Single employees were more likely to respond to premium increases by dropping coverage, whereas families tended to switch to another plan. Premium increases of 10% induced 7% of single employees to drop or severely cut back on coverage; 13% to switch to another plan; and 80% to remain in their existing plan. Similar figures for those with family coverage were 11%, 12%, and 77%, respectively. Simulation results that control for known covariates show similar increases. When faced with a dramatic increase in premiums—on the order of 20%—nearly one fifth of the single employees dropped coverage compared with 10% of those with family coverage. Conclusions: Employee coverage decisions are sensitive to rapidly increasing premiums, and single employees may be likely to drop coverage. This finding suggests that sustained premium increases could induce substantial increases in the number of uninsured individuals.health economics, health insurance, pay-roll tax, incentives, labor demand, labor supply

Legal Construct Validation: Expanding Empirical Legal Scholarship to Unobservable Concepts

This article contends that many of the fundamental concepts of law (such as justice, incentives, and deterrence) are not directly measurable, and have, therefore, been largely ignored by empirical legal scholarship. Fortunately, other social sciences have confronted this same obstacle and have developed methods with which to empirically assess these intangible concepts. I propose that the concept of construct validation, which has been developed in the psychology subfield of psychometrics, can be adapted to law to measure these unobservable traits. To adapt construct validation to law, empirical legal scholars must 1) develop generalized theories, 2) infer multiple hypotheses from these theories, 3) use appropriate research designs to test the hypotheses, and 4) the modify existing theories to reflect the empirical results of the studies. But this process is iterative and continuous, and the generalized theories should constantly be modified to reflect the newest information derived from empirical analyses. These modified theories, which are based on quantitative observations, can be used to better inform policymakers’ qualitative decisions

TERMINATION OF WAR DEPARTMENT CONTRACTS AT THE OPTION OF THE GOVERNMENT

The United States of America has been mobilized and waging war for more than two years. Every device known to science, every resource of the country, every means of production, has been and is being employed to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion. Public funds, in amounts beyond comprehension, have been appropriated for the production of materiel. As of March r943, the War Department alone had outstanding more than 240,000 contracts in the face amount of approximately $75,000,000,000

Entangled granular media

We study the geometrically induced cohesion of ensembles of granular "u-particles" which mechanically entangle through particle interpenetration. We vary the length-to-width ratio $l/w$ of the u-particles and form them into free-standing vertical columns. In laboratory experiment we monitor the response of the columns to sinusoidal vibration (frequency $f$, peak acceleration $\Gamma$). Column collapse occurs in a characteristic time, $\tau$, which follows the relation $\tau = f^{-1} \exp(\Delta / \Gamma)$. $\Delta$ resembles an activation energy and is maximal at intermediate $l/w$. Simulation reveals that optimal strength results from competition between packing and entanglement.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure