Description/Abstract

Although chronically ill individuals need protection against high medical expenses, they often have difficulty obtaining adequate insurance coverage due to medical underwriting practices used to classify and price risks and to define and limit coverage for individuals and groups. Using data from healthy and chronically ill individuals in Indiana, we found that illness decreased the probability of having adequate insurance, particularly among single individuals. Chronic illness decreased the probability of having adequate coverage by about 10 percentage points among all individuals and by about 25 percentage points among single individuals. Pre-existing condition exclusions were a major source of inadequate insurance. Our results emphasize the impact of enforcing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1997, which limits pre-existing condition exclusions.

Document Type

Working Paper

Date

2000

Keywords

Analysis of health care markets, health production, public health, chronic illness, health insurance, health insurance coverage, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA

Language

English

Series

Working Papers Series

Disciplines

Health Policy

Additional Information

Harvest from RePEc at http://repec.org

Source

Metadata from RePEc

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Included in

Health Policy Commons

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