Health Insurance

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I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The employer doesn't want to give you something you don't value. They'd rather give you the money and let you spend it yourself. So if I have insurance, I have an incentive to use it because it's paid for by somebody else. But I started to wonder whether that's a very good system.

Economist Ed Dolan of the Niskanen Center talks about employer-based health insurance with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Dolan discusses how unusual it is relative to other countries that so many Americans get their health insurance through their employer and the implications of that phenomenon for the structure of the health insurance market. Dolan explores the drawbacks of this structure and makes the case for what he calls Universal Catastrophic Coverage.