Insuring against health shocks: Health insurance and household choices

Kai Liu

Journal of Health Economics, 2016, vol. 46, issue C, 16-32

Abstract: This paper provides empirical evidence on the role of public health insurance in mitigating adverse outcomes associated with health shocks. Exploiting the rollout of a universal health insurance program in rural China, I find that total household income and consumption are fully insured against health shocks even without access to health insurance. Household labor supply is an important insurance mechanism against health shocks. Access to health insurance helps households to maintain investment in children's human capital during negative health shocks, which suggests that one benefit of health insurance could arise from reducing the use of costly smoothing mechanisms.

Keywords: Health insurance; Health shocks; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 I13 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (70)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629616000035
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Insuring against Health Shocks: Health Insurance and Household Choices (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:46:y:2016:i:c:p:16-32

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2016.01.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().