Today’s insurance rates are often only a rough approximation of the actual risks they insure, categorizing insurance takers into coarse classes based on long-term demographic facts such as age or address. This not only negatively affects the care with which the insured good is treated, but also often implies a significant amount of cross-financing from low-risk customers to high-risk customer. ...

Several theoretical studies suggest that only uninsured depositors have an incentive to discipline their banks, i. e. react with changes in deposit volumes or in required interest rates as a reaction to changes in banks’ risk. This paper empirically investigates whether German savings banks are disciplined by their depositors although these should be regarded as fully insured due to public guar...

In this paper, I examine the impact of uninsured patients on the in-hospital mortality rate of insured heart attack patients. I employ panel data models using patient discharge and hospital financial data from California (1999-2006). My results indicate that uninsured patients have an economically significant effect that increases the mortality rate of insured heart attack patients. I show that...

New estimates from the Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey, 2014, indicate that 23 percent of 19-to-64-year-old adults who were insured all year--or 31 million people--had such high out-of-pocket costs or deductibles relative to their incomes that they were underinsured. These estimates are statistically unchanged from 2010 and 2012, but nearly double those found in 2003 when the...

The magnitude of provider uncompensated care has become an important public policy issue. Yet existing measures of uncompensated care are flawed because they compare uninsured payments to list prices, not to the prices actually paid by the insured. We address this issue using a novel source of data from a vendor that processes financial data for almost 4000 physicians. We measure uncompensated ...

Despite prominent roles for employers and state regulation in the Clinton administration's Health Security Act, relatively little attention has been accorded to the impact of federal preemption of state legislation through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). As interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, ERISA permits state regulation of insured employee health plans but otherwise p...

Farmers have a high rate of suicide (1% of suicides in England and Wales). This study sought to test whether farmers would be less likely to have been in contact with primary or mental health services before death due to their reluctance to seek help. The study also sought to identify other characteristics that differentiated suicide among male farmers from other professional groups. A retrospe...

OBJECTIVE To determine demographic and diagnostic information about the medically uninsured patient population and compare it with that of the medically insured patient population at a primary care centre. DESIGN Medical chart audit. SETTING Department of Family and Community Medicine at St Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Ont. PARTICIPANTS Medically uninsured patients who were treated in t...

* Lecturer and Research Associate, School of Social Work, University of Toronto; author and formerly social worker in Great Britain. "Subject to the provisions of this Act, every person who, on or after the appointed day, being over school leaving age and under pensionable age, is in Great Britain, and fulfills such conditions as may be prescribed as to residence in Great Britain, shall become ...

OBJECTIVES To describe the relation between spirometric findings and farming characteristics and variables of exposure to organic dust measured during work in animal buildings. Farmers have traditionally been described as having one of the most dangerous occupations, so a large scale study on European farmers was carried out. This is the report of the second part of that study. METHODS 40 pig...