scholarly journals Health insurance and subjective well‐being: Evidence from two healthcare reforms in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seonghoon Kim ◽  
Kanghyock Koh
2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristopher Velasco ◽  
Pamela Paxton ◽  
Robert W. Ressler ◽  
Inbar Weiss ◽  
Lilla Pivnick

Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs has been to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community effects remains an open question. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel and change-score models from 2005 to 2013, this study explores whether communities with national service programs exhibit greater subjective well-being. We use novel measures of subjective well-being derived from tweeted expressions of emotions, engagement, and relationships in 1,347 U.S. counties. Results show that national service programs improve subjective well-being primarily by mitigating threats to well-being and communities that exhibit more engagement are better able to attract national service programs. Although limited in size, these persistent effects are robust to multiple threats to inference and provide important new evidence on how national service improves communities in the United States.


2005 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy A. Judge ◽  
Timothy D. Chandler

Employee shirking, where workers give less than full effort on the job, has typically been investigated as a construct subject to organization-level influences. Neglected are individual differences that could explain why employees in the same organization or work-group might shirk. Using a sample of workers from the health care profession in the United States, the present study sought to address these limitations by investigating subjective well-being (a dispositional construct), job satisfaction, as well as other indiuidual-level determinants of shirking. Results indicate that whites shirk significantly more than nonwhites, and that subjective well-being, job satisfaction, and age have significant, negative effects on shirking. The implications of these results are discussed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Kaestner ◽  
Darren Lubotsky

Health insurance and other in-kind forms of compensation and government benefits are typically not included in measures of income and analyses of inequality. This omission is important. Given the large and growing cost of health care in the United States and the presence of large government health insurance programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, it is crucial to understand how health insurance and related public policies contribute to measured economic well-being and inequality. Our paper assesses the effect on inequality of the primary government programs that affect health insurance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-350
Author(s):  
Fabian Kratz ◽  
Alexander Patzina

Abstract According to theories of cumulative (dis-)advantage, inequality increases over the life course. Labour market research has seized this argument to explain the increasing economic inequality as people age. However, evidence for cumulative (dis-)advantage in subjective well-being remains ambiguous, and a prominent study from the United States has reported contradictory results. Here, we reconcile research on inequality in subjective well-being with theories of cumulative (dis-)advantage. We argue that the age-specific endogenous selection of the (survey) population results in decreasing inequalities in subjective well-being means whereas individual-level changes show a pattern of cumulative (dis-)advantage. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey (N = 15,252) and employing hierarchical age-period-cohort models, we replicate the finding of decreasing inequality from the United States with the same research design for Germany. Using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (persons = 47,683, person-years = 360,306) and employing growth curve models, we show that this pattern of decreasing inequality in subjective well-being means is accompanied by increasing inequality in intra-individual subjective well-being changes. This pattern arises because disadvantaged groups, such as the low educated and individuals with low subjective well-being show lower probabilities of continuing to participate in a survey and because both determinants reinforce each other. In addition to allowing individual changes and attrition processes to be examined, the employed multi-cohort panel data have further key advantages for examining inequality in subjective well-being over the life course: They require weaker assumptions to control for period and cohort effects and make it possible to control for interviewer effects that may influence the results.


2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Newland ◽  
Michael J. Lawler ◽  
Jarod T. Giger ◽  
Soonhee Roh ◽  
Eliann R. Carr

Author(s):  
Mark D. Sullivan

Despite accelerating expenditures on health care, the United States is falling behind peer countries in population health. The mismatch between dollars spent on health care and health achieved raises the question of the value of health services. How should we value these? The Affordable Care act expands access to care but does not question expert valuation of health states and health services. Rather than beginning with health insurance, a more productive path for our thinking proceeds from the nature of health to the nature of health care to the nature of health insurance. If we are to keep health care costs from rising no faster than GDP, we must make the patient the true customer for health care. Health policy should not aim to minimize objective disease or maximize subjective well-being, but to foster health capability. This encompasses the ability to enjoy health and to pursue it.


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