This paper studies bilateral insurance schemes across networks of individuals. While transfers are based on social norms, each individual must have the incentive to abide by those norms, and so we investigate the structure of self-enforcing insurance networks. Network links play two distinct and possibly conflictual roles. First, they act as conduits for transfers. Second, they act as conduits ...

Social legislation is the popular topic of the day. If he realizes it the Forgotten Man must be mildly annoyed by being so well remembered. While the noisy protagonists of the various styles of social insurance are making their stirring pleas it is only right that the opponents have their day in court. Dr. Ochsner ably presents the case. His long and active career as a student in the Health Ins...

*The original version of this paper was written for the Office of ASPER of the U.S. Department of Labor in 1975. This is a revision of ‘Unemployment insurance as a social insurance program’ presented at the ISPE Conference on Social Insurance held near Tokyo. Japan in May 1977. I would like to thank participants at this conference, M.A. Baily, G.S. Fields and the referees for helpful comments. ...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of the tax preference for health insurance on health care spending using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys from 1996-2005. We use the fact that Social Security taxes are only levied on earnings below a statutory threshold to identify the impact of the tax preference. Because employer-sponsored health insurance premiums are excluded from Social...

This is the latest in a series of reports of the same title that have been published intermittently since the early 1960’s. The term social security is popularly used in the United States to refer to the basic national social insurance program-old-age, survivors, disability, and health insurance. The term is used here in a broader sense to describe all types of social insurance, social assistan...

In carrying out its statutory mandate to make studies concerning the advancement of economic security through social insurance, the Social Security Administration has followed closely the progress of voluntary health insurance. Important developments in this field have occurred during the 3 years that have passed since the Administration's Bureau of Research and Statistics published the results...

We examine the proposal by Peter Zweifel and Michael Breuer to combine risk-based premiums with a subsidy for individuals whose expenditure for health insurance exceeds a certain share of income. Assuming a maximin social welfare function and optimal linear income taxation, we find that this proposal is superior to social insurance if the correlation between productivity and health is not too l...

Due to the rapid progress in medical technology social insurance systems will soon no longer be able to grant health services without limits but must employ non-price rationing devices. This raises the question how these limits will be determined. Here we consider a direct democracy where the size of the social health insurance plan is determined in a popular referendum using simple majority ru...

Social medical insurance schemes are crucial for realizing universal health coverage and health equity. The aim of this study was to investigate whether and how reimbursement for injury-induced medical expenses is addressed in Chinese legislative documents relevant to social medical insurance. We retrieved legislative documents from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure and the Lawyee dat...