Health Insurance Exchanges
This session consists of three empirical papers investigating individual response to health care reform, with a particular focus on health insurance exchanges. The first paper studies “marriage lock” in which couples stay married for the sake of health insurance coverage. Using the Health and Retirement Survey and the American Community Survey data, the paper finds an increased incentive for marriage in Massachusetts after the 2006 health care reform. The second paper is focused on plan selection behavior on the Federal health insurance exchanges. It finds that within a rating area, insurers could offer plans in some counties but ignore the rest. The paper explores exogenous county characteristics that are associated with insurers’ selection behavior, based on which to infer whether insurers select counties by profitability or simply due to mistakes. The third paper analyzes the labor supply response to income cutoffs of a subsidized health insurance program in the Massachusetts reform by exploiting the nonlinearity feature of budget constraints for households created by the eligibility regulation under the reform. Using data from the American Community Survey, the author finds clear evidence of income manipulation around the cutoffs of 150 percent and 300 percent Federal Poverty Level, with differences in majority types of population manipulating income around each cutoff. The paper also estimates the elasticity of labor supply with respect to wage, and the welfare loss due to the subsidized program.