The Provision of Public Universal Health Insurance: Impacts on Private Insurance, Asset Holdings and Welfare
2010/09/10
研討會日期 : 2010-09-10
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Minchung Hsu
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Minchung Hsu got hin Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Los Angeles in 2007. He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Economics at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. His research field is in macroeconomics and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models.
演講摘要 : This paper aims to investigate impacts of public provision of universal health insurance (UHI) in an environment with household heterogeneity and financial market incompleteness. Both distortionary (payroll-tax) and non-distortionary (lump-sum tax) methods to finance the UHI are compared to address tax distortion and corresponding welfare implications. We undertake a dynamic equilibrium over-lappinggenerations model with endogenous insurance purchasing and labor supply decisions to perform quantitative analyses. We find clear crowding out effects on asset holdings and private health insurance (PHI) purchases. The redistribution effects on welfare across generations and across wealth groups are observed. We also identify the distortion caused by the payroll tax financing of the UHI, which reduces labor supply and further crowds out PHI and asset holdings. We also compare UHI policies with various expenditure coverage rates, our results suggest the rates in most OECD countries might be too high when taking into account the tax distortion.
