Using data from a 1992 community survey of children and their parents (or guardians), we found major gaps in mental health insurance coverage. Interestingly, private insurance had no statistically significant effect on use of mental health services. Youth without insurance coverage and those with public insurance had higher rates of serious emotional disorder than did those with private insuran...

OBJECTIVES The Affordable Care Act's expansions to Medicaid and private coverage are of particular importance for women of childbearing age, who have numerous preventive care and reproductive health care needs. STUDY DESIGN We conducted two national surveys, one in 2012 and one in 2015, collecting information about health insurance coverage and access to care from 8000 women aged 18-39. We ex...

Health status and health care utilization among children are profoundly influenced by health insurance coverage. Uninsured and underinsured children are less likely than adequately insured children to receive preventive health care, have a usual source of care, and receive health care within a medical home that addresses their comprehensive needs. Gaps in health insurance coverage may lead to d...

A range of proposals are now being considered to reform the health care system, specifically to provide access to health insurance coverage for the uninsured. Proposals from President Obama and members of Congress include a range of public-private approaches, typically called “building blocks” approaches, which build upon our current system of health insurance to provide access to health insura...

R ecord growth in health care costs and increasing instability in health insurance coverage have combined to make health care a central issue in the 2004 presidential election. Nearly all the candidates who competed in the Democratic primary, as well as President Bush, proposed formal plans to expand health insurance coverage and make it more affordable. The Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health In...

Health insurance coverage plays a key role in meeting adolescents’ needs by increasing their access to health care, yet adolescents are more likely to lack coverage than younger children.1 One in seven adolescents ages 10 to 18 has no form of public or private insurance.2 Even higher rates of uninsurance are found among lowincome, black, and Hispanic adolescents. For lowincome adolescents, insu...

This paper studies the implications of unobservable consumer naivete on selection and welfare in a competitive insurance market with moral hazard. We identify two distinct forces of sophistication driving the formation of market equilibriums. One is that sophistication helps individuals internalize the incentive to take high effort by adopting some commitment devices, and hence sophisticates ar...

This article analyzes the optimal deductible level of insurance on durable consumption goods with a positive premium loading in a continuous-time economy. Assuming financial assets and durable consumption goods can be traded without transaction costs, we provide an explicit solution for the optimal insurance coverage of durable consumption goods together with optimal trading strategies for the ...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage in the United States through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, subsidies, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. This paper estimates the causal effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage in 2014 using data from the American Community...

In 2006 Massachusetts enacted a major health care reform aimed at achieving near-universal coverage in the state. While other studies have found that this reform substantially affected the use of health services in general, the impact of the reform on children is largely unexplored.1 Children are of special interest to policymakers because it is widely believed that better health in early child...