RESUMEN
The welfare associated with public insurance is often difficult to quantify because the demand for coverage is unobserved and thus cannot be used to analyze welfare. However, in many settings, individuals can purchase private insurance to supplement public coverage. This paper outlines an approach to use data and variation from private complementary insurance to quantify welfare associated with counterfactuals related to compulsory public insurance. We then apply this approach using administrative data on disability insurance. Our findings suggests that public disability insurance generates substantial surplus for the sample population, and there may be gains to increasing the generosity of coverage.
RESUMEN
Despite the growth in health insurance products that differentially cover preventive care and nonpreventive care, little is known about how preventive care utilization responds to targeted changes in coverage. Using administrative data from a large company, this paper examines the implementation of an insurance benefit design which differentially increased the price of nonpreventive care while decreasing the price of prevention. Leveraging a difference-in-differences research strategy, we find that preventive care utilization did not increase and even declined due to the differential price change. This evidence indicates a meaningful negative cross-price effect, suggesting that nonpreventive care and preventive care are complements.