Does public flood aid crowd out private insurance?

Author(s):  
Nicola Garbarino
Keyword(s):  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Roan Gresenz ◽  
Sarah Edgington ◽  
Miriam Laugesen ◽  
José Escarce

1996 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. M. Cutler ◽  
J. Gruber

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 1999-2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Roan Gresenz ◽  
Sarah E. Edgington ◽  
Miriam Laugesen ◽  
José J. Escarce

Author(s):  
Stephen H. Long ◽  
M. Susan Marquis

This paper examines how varying the level of subsidies affects participation in a public insurance program, crowd-out of private insurance, and adverse selection. We study the experience in Washington's Basic Health program in 1997. Findings show that adverse selection is not a problem in voluntary public programs. Increasing subsidies have only modest effects on participation in subsidized programs, though the gains are not at the expense of the private market. Overall participation in the subsidized plan is also modest, even though participants benefit from it. The challenge to policymakers is to find program design characteristics, beyond subsidies, that attract the uninsured.


Author(s):  
Lara D. Shore-Sheppard

Abstract Despite considerable research, there is little consensus about the impact of Medicaid eligibility expansions for low-income children. In this paper, I reexamine the expansions’ impact on Medicaid take-up and private insurance “crowd-out” by investigating a number of critiques leveled at the seminal work of Cutler and Gruber (1996) and extending the analysis to include further expansions of Medicaid. I find that accounting for most critiques of Cutler and Gruber does not substantively affect their estimates of sizable take-up and crowd-out. However, controlling for age-specific time trends does substantially reduce the estimated take-up and crowd-out and recovers results close to those found elsewhere in the literature. I also find that later expansions generated much lower rates of take-up and crowding out.


2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsey Leininger ◽  
Helen Levy ◽  
Diane Schanzenbach

About 7.4 million children were covered by the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) at some point during fiscal year 2008. Many of these children would probably have had private coverage in the absence of SCHIP; recent estimates of the extent of “crowd-out” associated with SCHIP are about 60 percent (Gruber and Simon 2008). The high rate of crowd-out means that the program is not as effective as it could be at reducing the number of uninsured children and has been a political liability for the program. Both political concerns and policy research focusing on crowd-out in SCHIP build on more than a decade of similar attention to the crowd-out associated with the Medicaid expansions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. While there is little doubt that expanding eligibility for public insurance to children who are not poor will lead some to substitute public for private coverage, this substitution should increase total resources available to these households in two ways. First, those who drop private coverage in order to enroll their children in SCHIP can take whatever they had been spending on health insurance and spend it on something else. Second, public insurance requires less cost-sharing than a typical private insurance policy, providing first-dollar coverage with minimal co-payments. This means that switching from private to public coverage reduces a family’s out-of-pocket medical spending, freeing up even more of the family’s resources for other uses. From the perspective of a low-income family, then, crowd-out is a windfall. In this paper we ask: what do these families do with the additional resources? We address this question with an empirical analysis of consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We find that eligibility for SCHIP is associated with an increase in overall expenditure, and most of this increase is allocated to consumption of transportation or saving for retirement. These results suggest that the SCHIP expansions substantially improved the material well-being of the low-income families it is intended to assist – including those who had previously been paying for their own coverage. This evidence should allow a better accounting of the benefits and not just the costs of recent expansions in public health insurance programs.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document