IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/129368.html

Polarisation and public policy: political adverse selection under Obamacare

Author

Listed:
  • Bursztyn, Leonardo
  • Kolstad, Jonathan T.
  • Rao, Aakaash
  • Tebaldi, Pietro
  • Yuchtman, Noam

Abstract

Politicising policies designed to address market failures can diminish their effectiveness. We document a pattern of ‘political adverse selection’ in the health insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act (colloquially, ‘Obamacare’): Republicans enrolled at lower rates than Democrats and independents, a gap driven by healthier Republicans. This selection raised public subsidy spending by approximately $155 per enrollee annually (3.2% of average cost). We fielded a survey to show that this selection does not exist for other insurance products. Lower enrolment and higher costs are concentrated in more Republican areas, potentially contributing to polarised views of the policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Bursztyn, Leonardo & Kolstad, Jonathan T. & Rao, Aakaash & Tebaldi, Pietro & Yuchtman, Noam, 2026. "Polarisation and public policy: political adverse selection under Obamacare," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 129368, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:129368
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/129368/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • P00 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - General - - - General
    • H40 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - General
    • H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:129368. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.