Katherine Swartz

Katherine Swartz, associate professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health, will write a book examining the different reasons why people in the United States do not have health insurance. Most insurance plans offer different benefits at different prices so as to attract low-risk and discourage high-risk enrollees. This creates a pool of high-risk people who are priced out of insurance. The government could mandate standardized benefits, so that the low-risk subsidize the high-risk, but this would prevent insurers from offering low-cost health insurance to low-risk people, many of whom would opt out of the more costly standardized schemes. In a book that should reach policymakers as well as researchers, Swartz will think through these dilemmas and consider how we might resolve them.