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Record W3125375520

Are Health Insurance Markets Competitive

2008· preprint· en· W3125375520 on OpenAlexaff
Leemore Dafny

Bibliographic record

VenueRePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2008
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicInsurance and Financial Risk Management
Canadian institutionsKellogg's (Canada)
FundersNorthwestern University
KeywordsCeteris paribusBusinessConsolidation (business)Bargaining powerInsurance policyMarket powerGeneral insuranceHealth careProfit (economics)Actuarial scienceEconomicsFinanceEconomic growthMarket economy
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Although the vast majority of Americans have private health insurance, researchers focus almost exclusively on public provision.Data on the private insurance sector is extremely difficult to obtain because health insurance contracts are complex, renegotiated annually, and not subject to reporting requirements.This study makes use of a privately-gathered national database of insurance contracts agreed upon by a sample of large, multisite employers between 1998 and 2005.To gauge the competitiveness of the group health insurance industry, I investigate whether health insurers charge higher premiums, ceteris paribus, to more profitable firms.I find they do, and this result is not driven by cross-sectional differences across firms or plans: firms with positive profit shocks subsequently face higher premium growth, even for the same healthplans.Moreover, this relationship is strongest in geographic markets served by a small number of insurance carriers.Further analysis suggests profits act to increase employers' switching costs, and insurers exploit this inelasticity where they have sufficient bargaining power.Given the rapid industry consolidation during the study period, these findings suggest healthcare insurers possess and exercise market power in an increasing number of geographic markets.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.032
Threshold uncertainty score0.107

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.003
Scholarly communication0.0080.008
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0320.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.294
Teacher spread0.244 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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