'How could I choose my health insurance plan?' Determinants of employer-sponsored health insurance plan selection: application of machine learning technique

Yi Zhang and Jia Yu

International Journal of Economics and Business Research, 2022, vol. 23, issue 3, 353-367

Abstract: Selecting the appropriate, reasonable, and affordable health insurance plan becomes a very important question to solve for both employers and employees. Our research tries to locate the factors determining private sector health insurance plan enrolment decision, and also provides a guideline to both private companies and employees on health insurance plan selection strategies. By using Kaiser Family Foundation Annual Employer Health Benefits Survey (KFF EHBS) data, we apply random decision forest machine learning methodology to study the determinants of employees' health insurance selection, as well as to compare the prediction accuracy among different methodologies. The results indicate: 1) the employees at large firms and the firms with higher eligible rate would tend to choose PPO plan; 2) employees who need family coverage would have different choices comparing employees who seek for single coverage only; 3) employer's contribution and annual total contribution to the health insurance plan are the most important determinants on employees' insurance selection. The conclusion also can provide some suggestions to insurance companies on health insurance package design for different types of employers and employees.

Keywords: health insurance; PPO; high-deductible health plan; HDP; machine learning; random decision forest; logit regression. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=122056 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:ids:ijecbr:v:23:y:2022:i:3:p:353-367

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Economics and Business Research from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().