title: The effect of the availability of charity care to the uninsured on the demand for private health insurance.
abstract: The economic reasons why some people do not obtain health insurance are unclear. In this paper, I test the hypothesis that the availability of charity care to the uninsured reduces the likelihood of obtaining private coverage. I utilize variation in the availability of charity care across the different markets in the Community Tracking Study's Household Survey (CTS-HS) using an "access to care" measure of the uninsured's cost-related difficulties in obtaining medical care, to both aggregate across the various "safety net" providers and control for its potentially endogenous supply. I find evidence supporting this hypothesis for low-income people, in both the individual market and the employment-based group market. I also estimate a joint model of offer and take-up decisions for the group market sample and find that the availability of charity care reduces low-income workers' offer rates but not their take-up rates.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Policy and Management, Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, 1518 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. bradley.herring@emory.edu
authors.forename: Bradley
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Herring
mesh_terms: D002608:Charities; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D007348:Insurance, Health; D017057:Medically Uninsured; D017149:Private Sector; D014481:United States