The incentive for prevention in public health Systems

This paper examines the effect of moral hazard on public health insurance contract. It models primary prevention in a two period model with classification risk. Agent’s preferences appear to play an important role in the optimal determination of preventive effort and insurance between generations. If absolute prudence is larger than twice absolute risk aversion, moral hazard increases intergenerational insurance and classification risk. This highlights a tradeoff between prevention and insurance arising from classification risk. An increase in the difference between prudence and twice risk aversion (that we define as the degree of “protectiveness”) moreover makes public insurance contracts more stable (when competing with spot insurance) if the cost of prevention is low enough when agents preferences exhibit CRRA. Under a formulated utility function with linear reciprocal derivative, we finally show that an increase in agent’s degree of “protectiveness” enhances the stability of public insurance and the extent of intergenerational insurance.