This paper examines the recent experience with insurance and other risk-financing instruments in developing countries in order to gain insights into the effectiveness of these instruments in reducing economic insecurity. Insurance and other risk financing strategies are viewed as efforts to recover from negative income shocks through risk pooling and transfer. Specific examples of public-privat...

A ubiquitous form of government intervention in insurance markets is to provide compulsory, but partial, public insurance coverage and to allow voluntary purchases of supplementary private insurance. This paper investigates the effects of such programs on insurance coverage for the risks not covered by the public program, using the example of the US Medicare program. I find that Medicare does n...

In California, personal health care expenditures are estimated to total more than $367 billion in 2016. Approximately 71 percent of these expenditures will be paid for with public funds (i.e., taxpayer dollars). This estimated contribution of public funds to health care expenditures is much higher than estimates that include only major health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Se...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Central to health insurance reform discussions was the recurring question: why are eligible children not enrolled in public insurance programs? We interviewed families with children eligible for public insurance to (1) learn how they view available services and (2) understand their experiences accessing care. METHODS Semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 24 paren...

The Journal of Applied Research on Children is brought to you for free and open access by CHILDREN AT RISK at DigitalCommons@The Texas Medical Center. It has a "cc by-nc-nd" Creative Commons license" (Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives) For more information, Introduction Over the past decade, employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) for children has dropped by 12% due to increasing health care...

In the voluminous academic literature and public policy discourse on how health insurance affects medical spending, the famous RAND Health Insurance Experiment stands apart. Between 1974 and 1981, the RAND experiment provided health insurance to more than 5,800 individuals from about 2,000 households in six different locations across the United States, a sample designed to be representative of ...

BACKGROUND In the fragmented US health insurance system, women's health insurance coverage is an outcome both of changes in the availability of private and public health insurance and of changing patterns of labor force participation and household formation. Over the past 2 decades, women's socioeconomic circumstances have changed and public policy around health insurance coverage for low-incom...

Based on the experiences of Japan and Germany, Ikegami argues that middle-income countries should introduce public long-term care insurance (LTCi) at an early stage, before benefits have expanded as a result of ad hoc policy decisions to win popular support. The experience of the Netherlands, however, shows that an early introduction of public LTCi may not prevent, but ...

The provision of insurance for the poor, covering a variety of risks, could well be a key milestone in the fight against poverty. In richer economies, insurance achieved through broad public action and appropriately developed private mechanisms has fundamentally changed the lives of poor people. The difficulty in developing countries, however, is that insurance markets are limited, as (often) i...