（正规）医疗保险有何作用，又惠及谁？
What Does (Formal) Health Insurance Do, and for Whom?
Annual Review of Economics · 2018 · [{"name": "Amy Finkelstein", "affiliation": ["Northwestern University", "National Bureau of Economic Research", "University of Chicago", "Massachusetts Institute of Technology"]}, {"name": "Neale Mahoney", "affiliation": ["Northwestern University", "National Bureau of Economic Research", "University of Chicago", "IIT@MIT"]}, {"name": "Matthew Notowidigdo", "affiliation": ["Northwestern University", "National Bureau of Economic Research", "University of Chicago", "IIT@MIT"]}]
中文摘要
医疗保险为此前未参保者带来诸多益处，包括改善健康状况、减少自付医疗支出以及降低医疗债务。然而，由于名义上的未参保者仅支付其医疗费用的一小部分，医疗保险也向原本需要承担为未参保者提供无偿医疗服务成本的非受益方提供了大量转移支付。无偿医疗服务的普遍存在，有助于解释获得高额补贴的公共医疗保险参保率为何有限，也有助于解释相关证据所表明的现象：许多受益者对正规医疗保险的估值远低于保险机构提供该保障的成本。公共医疗保险补贴的分配效应，关键取决于其向无偿医疗服务提供者所作转移支付的最终经济归宿。
Abstract
Health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. However, because the nominally uninsured pay only a small share of their medical expenses, health insurance also provides substantial transfers to nonrecipient parties who would otherwise bear the costs of providing uncompensated care to the uninsured. The prevalence of uncompensated care helps explain the limited take-up of heavily subsidized public health insurance and the evidence that many recipients value formal health insurance at substantially less than the cost to insurers of providing that coverage. The distributional implications of public subsidies for health insurance depend critically on the ultimate economic incidence of the transfers that they deliver to providers of uncompensated care.