Moral Hazard in Health Insurance
Amy Finkelstein
Abstract
Moral hazard—the tendency to change behavior when the cost of that behavior will be borne by others—is a particularly tricky question when considering health care. Kenneth J. Arrow's seminal 1963 paper on this topic (included in this volume) was one of the first to explore the implication of moral hazard for health care, and this book examines this issue in the context of contemporary American health care policy. Drawing on research from both the original RAND Health Insurance Experiment and personal research, including a 2008 Health Insurance Experiment in Oregon, the book presents compelling ... More
Moral hazard—the tendency to change behavior when the cost of that behavior will be borne by others—is a particularly tricky question when considering health care. Kenneth J. Arrow's seminal 1963 paper on this topic (included in this volume) was one of the first to explore the implication of moral hazard for health care, and this book examines this issue in the context of contemporary American health care policy. Drawing on research from both the original RAND Health Insurance Experiment and personal research, including a 2008 Health Insurance Experiment in Oregon, the book presents compelling evidence that health insurance does indeed affect medical spending and encourages policy solutions that acknowledge and account for this.
Keywords:
moral hazard,
Kenneth J. Arrow,
health care,
health insurance,
policy solutions,
medical spending,
American health care,
health care policy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231163804 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231163804.001.0001 |
