The Australian Private Health Insurance Boom: Was It Subsidies Or Liberalised?

Harry Frech, Sandra Hopkins and Gary MacDonald

University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract: Over the period 1997 to 2000, the Australian government introduced two waves of price subsidies, then liberalised regulation to encourage private health insurance. Most of the increase in coverage occurred after the liberalization. Thus, it appears that this policy change rather than the earlier subsidies, explains most of the increase. We explore the relative impact of the different policy changes using trend analysis and careful attention to timing. While much of the increase in coverage may be attributed to liberalised regulation, the price subsidy did increase coverage. The increase was commensurate with existing estimates of the price elasticity of demand for health insurance.

Keywords: health insurance; age-rating; community rating; trend analysis; price (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-12-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/6j47s8kq.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Australian Private Health Insurance Boom: Was It Subsidies Or Liberalised? (2000)
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:cdl:ucsbec:qt6j47s8kq

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().