What is the Cost of Health Insurance Mandates?

Today, the Pacific Research Institute published From Heart Transplants to Hairpieces: The Questionable Benefits of State Benefit Mandates for Health Insurance (the link takes you to an abstract with option to download the PDF). Author John R. Graham digs into 28 actuarial and econometric articles to estimate the cost of mandates that state governments are making upon health insurers (i.e. about procedures that must be included in health insurance coverage). It is an interesting and increasingly important topic (the average number of mandates in a state has jumped from 5 to 32 in the past three decades).The PRI report is careful to detail the ambiguities  that exist in the data sets they analyzed, but then arrives at an estimate that an additional mandate explains a 0.25% increase in the number of uninsured.

On balance, econometric research shows that state benefit mandates increase health insurance premiums, causing large firms to incur the extra costs of self-insuring, as well as reducing wages and increasing employees hours worked, and depriving some workers of health benefits altogether.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 4:46 PM. It is filed under U.S. & Canada and tagged with health care, insurance, Pacific Research Institute, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.