We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance and Survey of Income Program Participation to show that young households with children are under-insured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies. We develop a macroeconomic model with human capital risk, limited pledgability of human capital (limited contract enforcement), and age-dependent returns to human capital investment. ...

Medicare is a popular program in Canada that offers universal access to medically-necessary healthcare services for all Canadians through a public insurance plan in each province. In spite of its popularity, healthcare privatization has been debated, often over concerns about wait times for healthcare services. A case report focused on the 2005 Supreme Court's response to the "Chaoulli v. Quebe...

Theoretical models of guaranteed renewable insurance display front-loaded premium schedules. Such schedules 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. Questions have been raised of whether actual individual insurance markets in the US approximate the behavior predicted by these...

There is little difference between the ethical, legal and social concerns regarding commercialization and geneticization. Most of the critiques posit specific effects on individuals and communities, such as loss of opportunity to purchase insurance or to be employed, reduced tolerance for diversity in the range of human abilities and experiences, increased pressure to utilize genetic technologi...

Using panel data from the 2007-09 Survey of Consumer Finances, this research explores channels through which the Great Recession affected households’ demand for life insurance policies. Existing literature suggests that the economic downturn induced changes in insurance coverage due to both financial and psychological shocks. This paper utilizes Probit regressions with differenced explanatory v...

65 On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or the Act) into law.1 ACA aims to improve access to care and health outcomes through a number of mechanisms, including requiring most individuals to carry health insurance, prohibiting insurers from denying health insurance coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and creating exchanges through w...

Switzerland's consumer-driven health care system achieves universal insurance and high quality of care at significantly lower costs than the employer-based US system and without the constrained resources that can characterize government-controlled systems. Unlike other systems in which the choice and most of the funding for health insurance is provided by third parties, such as employers and go...