Suchergebnisse

In Scandinavia, the provision of health care services has been, almost entirely, the responsibility of the public health care system. However, in the last five to seven years there has been remarkable growth in the private health care market. These health care services are obtained normally through insurance contracts. In this paper, I seek explanations for this phenomenon, using data from Norway. First, using available market data, I document that the market for private treatment insurance - often labelled as "jump the treatment queue insurance" - is growing rapidly. Thereafter, I present a theoretical model that identifies primary drivers for individual demand for treatment insurance. The third step is to analyse a unique survey data set that is combined with aggregate county data on treatment queues. The overall results indicate that public waiting lists affect the demand for privately bought insurance, while employer-provided insurance does not seem to be affected. I find strong preference for this type of insurance among smokers and the self-employed. Moreover, income is an important determinant of insurance demand.

Using survey data and the instrument developed by Barsky et al. (), we estimate the distribution of attitudes towards income risk in a country where many employment and health‐related risks are generously covered by a tax‐financed social insurance system (Norway in 2006). Under a constant relative risk aversion assumption, the sample average for the coefficient of relative risk aversion is 3.8 with standard deviation 2.3. This number is then contrasted to that for five other OECD countries where risk attitudes have been measured using the same instrument and also prior to the financial crisis: Chile, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the USA. When we relate this distribution for stated relative risk aversion to that for generosity of social insurance and the risks related to employment and health expenditure, a picture emerges suggesting that more extensive welfare states induce higher risk tolerance for foreground risks—a relationship that is in line with the theory on risk vulnerability.