From BGSU COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES
Who is Really Providing Your Health Insurance? That will be the topic for the next Science Café Tuesday, March 14, 6:30-7:30 p.m. Thevent, nosted by the BGSU College of Arts and Science will be held virtually. Click to register.
(This is rescheduled from February.)
In this session, Dr. Amanda Cook, associate professor in Economics at Bowling Green State University, will explore the complexities of healthcare expenditure in the United States. Many Americans think of us as havening both a public and private system, with public insurance being affiliated with the government and the private system which is largely organized around employer-sponsored insurance.
However, the reality is far more complex. Two out of three Medicaid enrollees have plans that are administered by a private company. More than half of enrollees in Medicare are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, which are run by a private company. So, even within our “public” options, more than 240 million Americans are in a plan administered by a private company.
When you consider that we have about 350 million Americans and about 30 million are uninsured, it becomes clear that private insurance is deeply enmeshed in all parts of the US healthcare and health insurance system. The public system is not public. This has important implications for how we think about insurance and public policy.
Dr. Cook will be joined by Illinois State University professor Dr. Sirmans and student Maricait Gillespie as panelists.
Dr. Amanda Cook is an associate professor in Economics at Bowling Green State University. She received her Master of Economics from Vanderbilt University and her Ph.D. in Economics from Purdue University. Her research interests are in health economics, econometrics, and industrial organization. She studies hospital reimbursement, health insurance, and health policy. Her recent work has focused on upcoding, the negative health effects of being uninsured, empirically modeling how hospitals and insurance companies divide surplus based on market characteristics, and theoretically modeling the health insurance market as a platform market.
This is one in a series of events to highlight the important work being done by BGSU researchers that impacts the quality of life in our region, state, and world.
