EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Medical expenditures over the life-cycle: persistent risks and insurance

Taiyo Fukai (), Hidehiko Ichimura (), Sagiri Kitao () and Minamo Mikoshiba ()
Additional contact information
Taiyo Fukai: Gakushuin University
Hidehiko Ichimura: University of Arizona
Sagiri Kitao: National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS)
Minamo Mikoshiba: Nagoya University

The Japanese Economic Review, 2025, vol. 76, issue 2, No 3, 285-336

Abstract: Abstract This paper builds a life-cycle model of single and married households and evaluates the roles of the national health insurance system. We use the administrative data on nationwide health insurance claims in Japan to analyze medical expenditure risks and calibrate the model with the stochastic process that varies by age and gender. Economic and welfare effects of health insurance reform depend on household income levels and generosity of the welfare program. Without health insurance, high-income households turn to self-insurance, significantly increasing aggregate savings. Low-income households, especially low-skilled single men and women, reduce savings and many of them become welfare recipients. Raising copayment rates for the elderly increases household savings, but depletes wealth of low-income households and leads to a rise in the number of welfare recipients.

Keywords: Medical expenditures; Health risks; Health insurance; Life-cycle model; Fiscal sustainability; Japan; D15; E21; I10; I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s42973-025-00190-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jecrev:v:76:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s42973-025-00190-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/42973

DOI: 10.1007/s42973-025-00190-z

Access Statistics for this article

The Japanese Economic Review is currently edited by Michihiro Kandori

More articles in The Japanese Economic Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-23
Handle: RePEc:spr:jecrev:v:76:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s42973-025-00190-z