Exit, Voice or Loyalty? An Investigation into Mandated Portability of Front-Loaded Private Health Plans

Juan Pablo Atal (), Hanming Fang, Martin Karlsson and Nicolas Ziebarth ()
Additional contact information
Juan Pablo Atal: Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private long-term health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, German legislature made the portability of standardized old-age provisions mandatory. Our theoretical model predicts that the portability reform will increase internal plan switching. However, under plausible assumptions, it will not increase external insurer switching. Moreover, the portability reform will enable unhealthier enrollees to reoptimize their plans. We find confirmatory evidence for the theoretical predictions using claims panel data from a big private insurer.

Keywords: individual private health insurance; portability; old-age provisions; health plan switching; switching costs; health policy reform; consumer bargaining; retention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G22 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2017-05-23, Revised 2017-05-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/filevault/SSRN%2017_012.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Exit, Voice, or Loyalty? An Investigation Into Mandated Portability of Front‐Loaded Private Health Plans (2019)
Working Paper: Exit, Voice or Loyalty? An Investigation into Mandated Portability of Front-Loaded Private Health Plans (2017)
Working Paper: Exit, Voice or Loyalty? An Investigation into Mandated Portability of Front-Loaded Private Health Plans (2017)
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:pen:papers:17-012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Administrator ().