The Impact of Tort Reform on Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Premiums, ,
NBER Working Paper No. 15371 We evaluate the effect of tort reform on employer-sponsored health insurance premiums by exploiting state-level variation in the timing of reforms. Using a dataset of healthplans representing over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006, we find that caps on non-economic damages, collateral source reform, and joint and several liability reform reduce premiums by 1 to 2 percent each. These reductions are concentrated in PPOs rather than HMOs, suggesting that can HMOs can reduce "defensive" healthcare costs even absent tort reform. The results are the first direct evidence that tort reform reduces healthcare costs in aggregate; prior research has focused on particular medical conditions. This paper is available as PDF (366 K) or via emailA non-technical summary of this paper is available in the 2009 number 3 issue of the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w15371 Published: “The Impact of Tort Reform on Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Premiums,” with Ronen Avraham and Max Schanzenbach, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations, October 2012, 28(4). Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:
|
Contact Us
