Canceled – Economics Lecture Series: What Does Health Insurance Do?

Dr. Matthew J. Notowidigdo, University of Chicago

Dr. Notowidigdo's lecture will discuss how health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. He argues that health insurance also confers benefits to health care providers, because the uninsured often pay only a small share of their medical expenses. The prevalence of this "uncompensated care" for the uninsured helps explain the limited take-up of heavily-subsidized public health insurance, which is often interpreted as evidence that public health insurance recipients value formal health insurance at substantially less than the cost to insurers of providing that coverage. The Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion has been a useful laboratory for studying all of these economic issues.