DePaul University Professor Tony Lo Sasso will present for the Seminar Series.
About Tony LoSasso
Professor Lo Sasso is Professor and Chair of the Economics Department at DePaul University in Chicago, where he also serves as a Driehaus Fellow in the Driehaus College of Business. His research focuses on health and labor economics, with particular interest in how government policies influence private sector decisions and how market forces can be harnessed to improve healthcare delivery and public health. His work has been supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and several private foundations.
Lo Sasso is keenly interested in how government policies affect private sector decisions. An area of particular interest for LoSasso is the effects of health insurance benefit design on health care utilization and health outcomes. This work includes an AHRQ-funded research grant to study so-called narrow network insurance plans; a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded study to examine the impact of an expansion of mental health benefits on cost and quality of care at a large manufacturing firm; and ongoing work examining the effects of high deductible health insurance on health care use.
About the presentation
We examine the welfare effects of insurance brokers in the small-group employer-sponsored health insurance market. Almost all employers work with insurance brokers to choose products, affecting 54% of the US population. However, there are limited empirical studies on how brokers affect insurance access, choice quality, or prices. We collect novel data on broker-insurer contracting networks, commission schedules, and employers’ broker and insurer choices. We find that brokers reduce search costs and increase insurance offering rates of small-group employers. We also find exclusive broker-insurer contracts soften the upstream price competition of insurers, and commissions distort brokers’ product recommendations, generating an agency problem for employers. To quantify the tradeoff between access, price, and quality, we develop an equilibrium model of individuals’ demand for insurance products, employers’ choice of brokers and insurers, brokers’ product recommendations, and insurers’ pricing and commission decisions. We plan to simulate the welfare effects of policies, including a ban on commission payments or exclusive contracts between insurers and brokers.
Please note that this event may be photographed. Images and other content may be published on Flickr and/or used to promote the La Follette School of Public Affairs in the future.
Organizer
La Follette School of Public Affairs,
Contact
Mindy Walker, mindy.walker@wisc.edu