A Colorado organization managed to produce ads promoting health insurance under the Affordable Care Act that are so goofy that some supporters thought they were a parody produced by over-caffeinated tea partiers. But the ads are more than just an unwitting parody. Some of them also unwittingly illustrate an economic principle that is crucial for understanding the cost of health insurance: moral hazard.
Two of the best examples are reproduced below.
Source: www.doyougotinsurance.com
Contrary to what you might think after reading the ads, “moral hazard” does not mean health insurance is hazardous to your morals. (For some commentary on what these ads say about morality, look here.)
Moral hazard refers to an insured party’s incentive to take greater risk because the insurer will pay the costs if there is a loss. The two ads above pretty clearly say, “Go ahead and engage in risky behavior, because if there’s a cost, your health insurance will take care of it.”
In the health care context, moral hazard can also involve excessive use of health care services because the insurer is paying the bill. “Excessive,” in this context, means that the patient uses a service even though its cost exceeds the value to the patient. For example, my Mercatus colleague Maurice McTigue tells me that before New Zealand reformed its health service, a lot of elderly people used to schedule monthly visits to the doctor’s office because it was free and provided a good opportunity to socialize with friends and neighbors. Visits dropped significantly after New Zealand’s health service instituted a $5 copay for doctor visits — which suggests that some of these visits were pretty unnecessary even from the patient’s perspective!
Moral hazard can have a big influence on the affordability of health insurance. Moral hazard losses in private insurance plans can equal about 10 percent of spending. Moral hazard losses in Medicare and Medicaid are much higher, equal to 28-41 percent of spending. (References for these figures are on page 8 of this paper.)
Duke University health care economist Christopher Conover and I examined the eight major regulations rushed into place in 2010 to implement the first wave of Affordable Care Act mandates. The government’s analysis accompanying these regulations failed to take moral hazard into account. In other words, federal regulators extended insurance coverage to new classes of people (such as “children” aged 21-26) and required insurance plans to offer new benefits (such as a long list of preventive services), without bothering to figure out how much of the resulting new health care expenditures would be wasted due to moral hazard.
Is it any wonder that health insurance under the Affordable Care Act has turned out to be less affordable for many people? Makes me want to do a keg stand to forget about it. After all, if I fall down and get hurt, I’m covered!