Health Insurance, Risk, and Responsibility after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
47 Pages Posted: 13 Feb 2011 Last revised: 12 Sep 2011
Date Written: September 12, 2011
Abstract
This essay explores the new social contract of healthcare solidarity through private ownership, markets, choice, and individual responsibility embodied in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This essay first explains the four main health care risk distribution institutions affected by the Act – Medicare, Medicaid, the individual and small employer market, and the large group market – with an emphasis on how the Act changes those institutions and how they are financed. The essay then describes the “fair share” approach to health care financing embodied in the Act. This approach largely rejects the actuarial fairness vision of what constitutes a fair share while pointing toward a new responsibility to be as healthy as you can. This new responsibility reflects the influence of health economics and health ethics, and it is part of the embrace of risk first described in the insurance as governance literature. There are challenges to achieving the solidarity through individual responsibility envisioned in the Act – most significantly ”risk classification by design” and non-compliance with the mandates – but the Act contains regulatory tools that the states, the new Exchanges, and the Department of Health and Human Services can use to address these challenges.
Keywords: Health law, health care, insurance, insurance law, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
JEL Classification: H51, I12, I18
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Adverse Selection in Insurance Markets: Policyholder Evidence from the U.K. Annuity Market
By Amy Finkelstein and James M. Poterba
-
Estimating Risk Preferences from Deductible Choice
By Alma Cohen and Liran Einav
-
Estimating Risk Preferences from Deductible Choice
By Alma Cohen and Liran Einav
-
The Role of Commitment in Dynamic Contracts: Evidence from Life Insurance
By Igal Hendel and Alessandro Lizzeri
-
Asymmetric Information and Learning: Evidence from the Automobile Insurance Market
By Alma Cohen
-
Private Information and its Effect on Market Equilibrium: New Evidence from Long-Term Care Insurance
-
The Interaction of Public and Private Insurance: Medicaid and the Long-Term Care Insurance Market
By Jeffrey R. Brown and Amy Finkelstein
-
The Interaction of Public and Private Insurance: Medicaid and the Long-Term Care Insurance Market
By Jeffrey R. Brown and Amy Finkelstein
-
Sources of Advantageous Selection: Evidence from the Medigap Insurance Market
By Hanming Fang, Michael P. Keane, ...
-
Sources of Advantageous Selection: Evidence from the Medigap Insurance Market
By Hanming Fang, Michael P. Keane, ...