This paper studies the political support for social health insurance when a private alternative exists. Individuals differ only by their risk. For the more realistic distributions of risk, a majority of agents do not want public insurance. However, in a representative democracy, or in a direct democracy with altruistic agents, we show that social insurance can be adopted, particularly for treatments which have the best cost-utility output. But if the low risk agents are more politically powerful than the high risk, the low cost treatments will not be refunded by social insurance, even if their utility is high.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 24 (2008) Issue (Month): 2 (June) Pages: 387-401 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF