Exam 7: The Economics of Health Care

A majority of people in the United States have private health insurance.

If consumers paid the full price of medical services instead of using health insurance and third-party payers to cover part of the cost, the quantity of medical services provided would increase.

Vaccinating people against a communicable disease such as influenza not only reduces the chances that the person vaccinated will catch the disease but also reduces the probability that an epidemic of the disease will occur.Which of the following statements is true?

Adverse selection occurs in the market for used cars because used car buyers

Figure 7-1 Figure 7-1 represents the market for vaccinations. Vaccinations are considered a benefit to society, and the figure shows both the marginal private benefit and the marginal social benefit from vaccinations. -Refer to Figure 7-1.The efficient equilibrium quantity is ________ thousand vaccinations.

What is the principal-agent problem?

Figure 7-2 Figure 7-2 represents the market for medical services with and without insurance, and the effect of a third-party payer system on the demand for medical services. -Refer to Figure 7-2.With insurance and a third-party payer system, what price do doctors receive for medical services?

Some economists have proposed making the tax treatment of employer-provided health insurance the same as the tax treatment of individually purchased health insurance and out-of-pocket health care spending.Such changes would make it more likely that

The health care system in Japan is referred to as ________, under which every resident of Japan is required to enroll in either a private, or the government-provided, health insurance program.

Those who favor changes in the market for health care that would make it more like the markets for other goods and services are generally in favor of universal health care coverage.

Moral hazard refers to the actions people take after they have entered into a transaction that make the other party to the transaction worse off.

Better health allows people to work harder, which raises a country's total income.This indicates that in effect, better health

Between 1981 and 2015, the overall mortality rate in the United States

Most doctors and hospitals operate as private businesses in all of the following countries except

Which of the following factors help to explain the sustained increases in health care spending in the United States, and which do not? a.the additional paperwork, duplication, and waste generated in the U.S.health care system compared to systems in other countries b.the increasing costs of malpractice insurance and malpractice lawsuit settlements c.the number of uninsured patients receiving hospital treatment that could have been performed at a lower cost in doctors' offices d.the slow growth in labor productivity in health care compared to that in the economy as a whole e.the aging population f.increases in the cost of providing health care

How can changes over time of the average height of the people in a country help to indicate the standard of living in a country?

The rising cost of malpractice insurance is one of the leading causes of the increase in health care spending as a percentage of GDP in the United States.

All of the following are part of the "state health insurance marketplaces" provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)except

In the United States, out-of-pocket spending on health care as a percentage of all spending on health care has ________ since 1960.

A typical consumer of health care in the United States