Health Insurance Effects

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bachelor_Hietala_Ville_2022.pdf (802.12 KB)

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School of Business | Bachelor's thesis
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Date

2022

Department

Taloustieteen laitos

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Bachelor’s programme in Economics

Language

en

Pages

20

Series

Abstract

Health insurance plays a critical role in the organization and funding of health services around the world and especially in the United States, where there is no universal health care for its population. A good opportunity to analyze what kind of effects health insurances have on society is when reforms on existing insurance programs are implemented. Therefore, this review article goes through three core papers, which analyze how having insurance affects people’s mortality, consumption of medical services, and debt. These fundamental articles use natural experiments to identify the effects of different changes in insurance coverage. These effects can be e.g., how the mortality changes when the insurance program goes through changes. The identification strategies used are difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity. The authors demonstrate that when there are changes in insurance coverage, e.g., mortality goes down when insurance coverage increases. Also, in the event of increasing coverage, consumption of medical services increases, and the amount of debt and number of bankruptcies go down. These articles and other relevant literature also provide the magnitude of these changes. Since there are countries besides the US, that do not have universal healthcare, this information is vital when trying to estimate the impact of increasing healthcare insurance coverage in a population.

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Thesis advisor

Stryjan, Miri

Keywords

health insurance, health economics, universal healthcare, natural experiments

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https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202301291639

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[kand] Kauppakorkeakoulu / BIZ (Open Access)