Is Health Insurance Good for Your Financial Health?

Nicole Dussault, Maxim Pinkovskiy and Basit Zafar

No 20160606, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: What is the purpose of health care? What is the purpose of health insurance? When people fall ill, they seek health care in order to get better. But insurance has a slightly different function: Its main role is not to protect our health per se, but to protect our finances. For most people, lifetime health expenditures are quite low. However, some people have enormous health costs owing to major illnesses or health conditions. And this is where health insurance comes in?its goal (like that of any other form of insurance) is to protect these individuals against large, and sometimes ruinous, health expenditures. Has the recent health reform served this purpose?

Keywords: Affordable Care Act; Medicaid; Consumer Credit Panel; collections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016 ... inancial-health.html Full text (text/html)

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:fip:fednls:87135

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().