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eriu: Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured Initiating and disemminating research to spark new policy discussion on health coverage issues.
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The Uninsured: Income, Risk, and the Affordability of Coverage

M. Kate Bundorf, Stanford University School of Medicine
Mark Pauly, University of Pennsylvania

The possibility that large numbers of high-risk Americans are unable to afford private health insurance is justifiably a key concern facing policy makers in the U.S. However, high-risk individuals are not the only segment of the population at risk of finding health insurance unaffordable. If premiums for low-risks do not reflect their expected benefits, low-risk individuals, particularly those with low-incomes, may also be reluctant to obtain coverage. This project will examine the relationship between risk, income and the purchase of private health insurance. Key objectives are to examine how health risk affects the purchase of health insurance in individual and group markets and to determine how the affordability of coverage for different risks has changed over time. We will estimate econometric models of the relationship between health risk, income and their interaction on the purchase of private health insurance using data from the 1987 NMES and the 1996-1999 MEPS.

 
 

ERIU is based at the University of Michigan with funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Our University of Michigan partners are the School of Public Health, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Economics Department, and the Institute for Social Research.

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