| In the past decade, the health care delivery system has experienced dramatic changes in both the reimbursement and the administration of services. Knowledge of a consumer's choices over insurance options sheds some lights on issues related to rising public funds for health care financing. In this dissertation, I examine consumer choice behavior in the health insurance market. Additionally, the interaction between insurance decision and health care utilization is also studied by taking into account of self-selection effect.;First, I build a theoretical model of demand for health insurance under uncertainty. Under the assumption of uncertainty about future health conditions, an individual makes decisions on the type and the size of health insurance coverage in order to maximize her expected utility. The results indicate that the insurance demand increases with income and decreases with endowed (pre-treatment) health.;Next, I conduct an empirical analysis by using the multinomial logit model to find the individual characteristics effects on health insurance choices. The estimates show significant income effect as predicted while fail to capture the health status effect.;Finally, I study the factors associated with Medicare beneficiaries' purchases of supplemental insurance coverage and the effects of supplemental insurance on health care service utilization. Various estimators for endogenous treatment effect on count data have been used and compared. The empirical findings indicate unobservable secondary advantageous selection factors which cancel out the incentive-induced moral hazard effect. |
