Examining the Impact of Government Tax Policies on the Development of the Market for Health Insurance

随着医疗价格和医疗支出的持续上涨，政府在医疗保险市场中的角色成为激烈辩论的主题。目前对雇主提供的医疗保险的税收补贴正在接受审查，因为它被认为鼓励了综合保险的增加和对医疗保健的需求。然而，调查这一问题的实证研究只使用了1954年税法重大变化后收集的数据。因此，税收补贴对健康保险市场发展的真正影响还有待检验。这项博士论文改进奖将允许以机器可读的形式放置由国家民意研究中心在1953和1958年进行的调查的成本，这些调查提供了详细的微观数据，有关医疗费用、医疗保险覆盖范围、收入、储蓄和就业的详细微观数据，从美国非制度化人口的地区概率样本中抽取约3000个家庭。由于1953年的数据是在重大税收变化之前收集的，因此可以使用分解技术直接测试1954年税收变化对医疗保险市场的影响。此外，这些数据包含有价值的信息，这些信息将用于未来检查健康保险市场发展的研究。

As medical prices and health care expenditures continue to rise, the government's role in the health insurance market is the subject of intensive debate. The current tax-subsidy of employer-provided health insurance is under scrutiny, as it is thought to have encouraged increases in comprehensive insurance and the demand for medical care. However, empirical studies investigating this issue have only employed data collected after major changes in the tax code were enacted in 1954. As a result, the true effect of the tax-subsidy on the development of the health insurance market has yet to be examined. This doctoral dissertation improvement award will permit the cost of placing in machine-readable form surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center in 1953 and 1958 which provide detailed micro-level data on medical expenses, health insurance coverage, income, savings, and employment for roughly 3,000 families drawn from an area-probability sample of the U.S. non-institutionalized population. Since the 1953 data were collected before the major tax changes, it will be possible to directly test the effect of the 1954 tax changes on the market for health insurance using a decomposition technique. In addition, the data contains valuable information that will be used in future research examining the development of the health insurance market.