Private Insurance

This slide shows that despite support for Medicare expansions and for a public option similar in design to Medicare, physicians preferred private plans to the traditional Medicare program in three areas.

Survey published by the New England Journal of Medicine shows strong physician support for mixed public-private proposal.

New brief details the procedure of insurers investigating policyholders’ medical history after a policy has been issued.

This paper outlines the obstacles to enacting purchase of insurance across state lines (PASL) and potential solutions, and concludes that as long as the legislation is thoughtfully drafted, there is no significant legal or Constitutional barrier to enacting PASL.

This paper examines insurance discrimination based on health status defining discrimination as how the insurance industry differentiates among individuals in designing and administering health insurance and employee health benefit products. The paper provides a brief overview of discrimination practices, the federal law, and federal reform options to manage discriminatory practices in the insurance and employee health benefit markets.

This RWJF-supported study by the Urban Institute indicates that HSA and HDHPs are likely to be attractive to people with high incomes and those with expected low use of health care services, but they are unlikely to decrease significantly the number of uninsured.

This paper considers design features of a health care reform proposal that would offer a government-run health insurance plan alongside competing private plans in a government-run insurance exchange. The Medicare program provides a practical guide to the problems and opportunities offered by such a mixed public and private system. Since both public and private plans have inherent advantages and disadvantages, both plans can be offered on a relatively level playing field. Among the items to be considered in creating a level playing field are the benefit package, advertising and consumer information, risk selection and risk adjustment, the choice environment, default enrollment, provider payment rates, and the administrative structure.

This paper examines the current role of health insurance regulation and the role that it could play in a reformed health care system. It begins by exploring the nature of health insurance and alternative approaches to regulation. It next considers the current status of state and federal health insurance regulation, both describing the development of health insurance regulation and examining arguments in support of and in opposition to regulatory interventions. Finally, it considers the kind of insurance regulation that will be needed in a reformed health care system, as well as the question of whether authority for insurance regulation should be placed at the federal or state level. The author concludes that the best approach would be to develop national standards for health insurance enforced primarily at the state level.

Individual and family subsidies have some important advantages over employer subsidies. They are better at targeting lower-income people, the largest segment of the uninsured. This paper argues that it is more efficient to provide subsidies directly to individuals and families than to employers.

This paper shows that all countries applying risk-adjusted premium subsidies have taken the form of risk equalization among insurers.