Keynote speaker 簡介 : Professor Jonathan Kolstad received his Ph.D. in Health Policy/Economics from Harvard University in 2009. He is currently an associate Professor at University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are Health Economics, Industrial Organization, Public Economics, Applied Microeconomics.
演講摘要 : We study differentiation across health insurance providers in the market for employer-sponsored health insurers. Using rich administrative data and firm and employer changes between plans we recover the causal contribution of private insurers/brands to health care spending overall, prices and quantities as well as granular measures of health care utilization. We find clear variation in total spending between private health insurers. E.g. moving from United Health Care to Regence causally increases spending by an average of 40%. We find that changes in spending between insurers are largely explained by differences in extensive margin measures of quantity of care consumed. We find much less differentiation across insurers in terms of bargaining over provider prices or utilization of high versus low value care.
