...Thomas Bodenheimer; Kevin Grumbach In a society with strong antitax sentiment and large government deficits, the enactment of universal health insurance is blocked by an impasse over financing. The two chief mechanisms for funding universal health insurance are taxes and insurance premiums. Taxes...

...Karl Hinrichs The statutory health care scheme represents the most ambitious branch of the German social insurance system because it entails interpersonal redistribution on a large scale. The stability of this centerpiece of the German welfare state thus depends on a “culture of solidarity” to...

...Jamie R. Daw; Steven G. Morgan; Patricia A. Collins; Julia Abelson Abstract Canada is the only country in the world to offer universal comprehensive public health insurance that excludes outpatient prescription medicines. Few scholars have attempted to explain this policy puzzle. We study media...

...Russell Korobkin Abstract Increases in health costs continue to outpace general inflation, and implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will exacerbate the problem by adding more Americans to the ranks of the insured. The most commonly proposed solutions — bureaucratic...

...Harvey M. Sapolsky I examine the development of privately provided insurance since World War II, giving special attention to Empire Blue Cross, and argue that the competition between employers and unions for the loyalty of workers after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act helped diffuse private...

...Joel C. Cantor Recent discussions on extending health insurance to the more than thirty million uninsured Americans have focused on two strategies: expanding the Medicaid program and mandating that employers sponsor coverage for their employees. This analysis, using a microsimulation model of the...

...Katherine Swartz There is mounting pressure at the federal (and state) level to require employers to provide health insurance to their employees. However, two quite different groups of workers could be affected by such a mandate. In addition, there are at least five major problems with requiring...

...Paul Fronstin Mark Pauly. Health Benefits at Work: An Economic and Political Analysis of Employment-Based Health Insurance . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 187 pp. $39.50 paper. Copyright © 1999 by Duke University Press 1999 388 Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law...

...David A. Moss Beatrix Hoffman. The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 261 pp. $39.95 cloth; $17.95 paper. © 2002 by Duke University Press 2002...

...Daniel J. B. Mitchell It is widely believed that the turning point for U.S. health insurance came in 1949 when Congress failed to adopt President Harry Truman's proposal for a national system. The possibility that a system of state-level health plans might have emerged before Truman's plan has...

...Amy Wolaver; Timothy McBride; Barbara Wolfe Employing a simultaneous model of part-time status, health insurance offers, and wages, we examine the impacts on employment and health insurance coverage of nondiscrimination rules in the tax code governing employer-sponsored health insurance. Using 1988...

...Karl Kronebusch; Brian Elbel The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 established federal grants to the states to create the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). This presented the states with a number of implementation choices concerning administrative models for the new programs, as well as...

...Penny H. Feldman; Margaret Gerteis Shifting financial risk from the public to the private sector is an increasingly attractive option to policymakers seeking to constrain Medicaid costs. This paper discusses the potential advantages and disadvantages of private insurance arrangements for Medicaid...

...Nelda McCall; Thomas Rice; Arden Hall This paper examines the effects of state regulations on the quality of insurance policies sold to Medicare beneficiaries and on the amount of sales abuse reported in the sale of such policies. State regulations regarding such policies relate to policy content...

...Uwe E. Reinhardt Rashi Fein, Medical Care, Medical Costs: The Search for a Health Insurance Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 240 pp., $20.00. Copyright © 1988 by Duke University Press 1988 182 Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law Under what...

...Ellen M. Immergut C. David Naylor, Private Practice, Public Payment: Canadian Medicine and the Politics of Health Insurance, 1911–1966 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986), 324 pp., $35.00 cloth, $ 15.95 paper. Copyright © 1988 by Duke University Press 1988...

...Lawrence G. Goldberg; Warren Greenberg In our previous paper, we showed that market forces can play a significant role in controlling health care costs and that a considerable amount of cost containment effort was pursued by third-party insurers in Oregon in the 1930s and 1940s. Although physicians...

...Walter McClure This paper presents a critical evaluation of four national health insurance models in light of their ability to counteract incentives in the present system that are dysfunctional in terms of costs and quality of care. The feasible models are labelled as: major risk insurance...