Health Insurance, Non-Deferrable Health Events and Financial Risk

在此输入文本，它是应用程序的新摘要信息。本节必须是否 超过30行的文本。 本研究的目的是估计健康保险对财务风险的影响， 年轻的老年人（65-80岁）相对于近老年人（50-64岁）。近的老人是 根据年龄不符合医疗保险资格，但比一般人群更有可能 严重的健康状况，从而暴露于医疗支出风险（威廉姆斯等人，2010）。 虽然只有不到1%的老年人没有保险，但近15%的老年人 2010年缺乏保险（肯尼亚森林论坛，2011年b）。因此，健康保险有可能大大提高 影响老年人相对于近老年人的财务风险暴露。 我们将使用15年（1996-2010）的医疗支出小组调查（MEPS），这是最高的 具有全国代表性的高质量数据，其中包含关于健康保险覆盖范围、健康状况、 条件，以及总的和自付的医疗支出，无论是整体还是按类别（例如， 住院病人、门诊病人）。我们将补充MEPS分析与医疗二级数据- 健康跟踪家庭调查（HTHS）和独特的主要 收集的与卫生支出相关的实际和感知财务风险数据， 兰德美国人寿保险小组。利用这些数据，这个探索性项目将解决 以下目标： (1)估计健康保险与实际和感知的财务风险之间的关系， 一个回归不连续性框架，利用医疗保险覆盖率在年龄上的不连续性， 65. (2)调查医疗保险对实际和感知财务风险影响的异质性 教育和种族/民族群体之间的差异以及其对金融风险差异的影响。 (3)估计预期中与医疗保险相关的风险暴露变化的福利变化 并将这种变化与该计划的社会成本进行比较。

Enter the text here that is the new abstract information for your application. This section must be no longer than 30 lines of text. The goal of this study is to estimate the impact of health insurance on financial risk among the young elderly (ages 65-80) relative to the near elderly (ages 50-64). The near elderly are ineligible for Medicare based on age but are more likely than the general population to have serious health conditions and thus be exposed to medical expenditure risk (Williams et al. 2010). While less than 1 percent of the elderly are uninsured, almost 15 percent of the near elderly lacked insurance in 2010 (KFF 2011b). Thus, health insurance has the potential to significantly affect exposure to financial risk for the elderly relative to the near elderly. We will use 15 years (1996-2010) of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), the highest quality nationally representative data containing information on health insurance coverage, health conditions, and total and out-of-pocket medical spending, both overall and by category (e.g. inpatient, outpatient). We will supplement the MEPS analysis with secondary data on medical- related financial stress from the Health Tracking Household Survey (HTHS) and unique primary data collected on the actual and perceived financial risk associated with health spending from the RAND American Life Panel (ALP). Using these data this exploratory project will address the following aims: (1) Estimate the relationship between health insurance and actual and perceived financial risk in an regression discontinuity framework, exploiting the discontinuity in Medicare coverage at age 65. (2) Investigate heterogeneity in the impact of Medicare on both actual and perceived financial risk across education and race/ethnicity groups as well as its impact on disparities in financial risk. (3) Estimate the welfare change from Medicare-related changes in risk exposure in an expected utility framework and compare this change to the social cost of the program.