The Argument for Basic Insurance for the Elderly

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

We're not very good as a society or maybe even as a species in planning for our last days. People who are sick have higher death rates they're more likely to die the other is you know and that that just seems plausible like of course we spend money more help more health care money on sick people than healthy people but if you look at cancer patients, it's hard to identify those with 90 95% chance of dying so most ski accidents don't really need to be caused by skiers being careful towards the end of the day.

If you knew exactly when every person was going to die, or require medical care, you could make a killing buying and selling insurance. Nobody knows these things, of course -- the future is hard to predict -- but some people know something about the future that other people don't. This sets up adverse selection: the ability of one party to leverage information another party doesn't have, in order to gain an economic advantage. Economist Amy Finkelstein is an expert in this phenomenon, as well as the usefulness of empirical studies in economic research.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Amy Finkelstein received her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT. She is the co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal. Her recent book, with co-authors Liran Einav and Ray Fisman, is Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.