Greetings,
Amy
Finkelstein serves currently as the Ford Professor of Economics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her other academic endeavors include the
wonderful honor to work as a co-Director of the Public Economics Program at the
National Bureau of Economic Research, where she is a Research Associate, and to
work as a co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics. She proudly calls both
Harvard University and Oxford University, England my alma mater.
The focus of her research in the
field of economics has focused primarily on healthcare systems and markets,
particularly in the US. She has published several large scale studies on
Medicare and Medicaid and has sought through my work to provide insights on
such health insurance markets that will help inspire future policy design.
The MIT News Office Reports that a
recently released working paper written by Finklestein and 4 co-authors found that enrolling in Medicaid, a US federal program for
low-income individuals and their families, helps the health and financial
stability of participants, and makes them more likely to receive medical care
than they otherwise would be. The MIT News office continues to report that,
Amy Finkelstein has published significant works about the effects of
asymmetric information in health insurance markets — elucidating, among other
things, how frequently individuals with information on their high health risks
purchase health insurance, and alternately, how frequently lower-risk people
purchase insurance because they are risk-averse. Her research on the public’s
behavior in health insurance markets directly applies to Economics 490, where
the behaviors of purchasers of health insurance will impact the manners in
which companies, who provide the services respond to customers and seek to
manipulate customers.
Before this
class I have not ever heard of Amy Finklestein, but I look forward to expanding
my knowledge. I am particularly interested to read Amy’s work and apply it to
enrich and deepen my understanding of federal decision-making in healthcare,
especially with the recent launch of Obama-Care.
References:
Truthfully, I only learned of Finkelstein recently myself, looking at the recent Clark Medal winners. At the U of I when hiring somebody, the health care costs aren't borne by the hiring unit. Instead they are paid by the State of Illinois. So hiring units on campus don't internalize the health care costs. (At least they haven't historically.) But in the private sector, those costs act as a huge fixed cost per employee. Perhaps in some future class we'll talk about about why most people get their health insurance through their employer.
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