 Covering the uninsured in the United States' multi-payer health systemJames Capretta
AEI Economic Perspectives, 2021 Abstract: Governments of advanced economies should ensure health coverage and ready access to needed medical care for their entire populations. Patients without insurance are at risk of experiencing avoidable health problems and higher mortality because they forgo care or get treatments later than is optimal. The US has moved, in halting steps, toward population-wide insurance enrollment but has not yet made spells without coverage an uncommon occurrence. The United States' reliance on multiple, competing insurance plans to provide coverage is necessary for using market incentives, but it also allows breaks in protection to occur. Policymakers can close many existing coverage gaps and move the nation closer to continuous population-wide enrollment without wholesale change by focusing on three reforms: building a nationwide automatic enrollment system for non-group insurance, giving employers options to increase take-up by more workers, and compromising on Medicaid as the nation's safety-net insurance plan. Immigration reform should address the large number of uninsured persons who reside in the US without proper authorization to do so. Keywords: AEI Economic Perspectives; Health Care Policy; Health Insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aei:journl:y:2021:id:1008601209 Access Statistics for this article More articles in AEI Economic Perspectives from American Enterprise Institute Contact information at EDIRC. |
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