Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 26, 2026

Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting (Propensity Score) using the Military Health System Data Repository and National Death Index
Published on: January 8, 2020
Comment-Defining health insurance affordability: unobserved heterogeneity matters
1US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, DC, United States. bradley.ralph@bls.gov
Abstract:
Affordability is a vague concept. Bundorf and Pauly [Bundorf, M.K., Pauly, M.V., 2006. Is health insurance affordable for the uninsured? Journal of Health Economics 25 (4), 650-673] address this problem by establishing clear working definitions of affordability, and they use these definitions to estimate the percent of the uninsured who can afford insurance. When they establish their definitions of affordability, they use a microeconomic model that omits essential characteristics of the health insurance market. This comment suggests alternative definitions that better incorporate the structure of the health insurance market, discusses both endogeneity and specification problems that might occur when implementing their econometric model to estimate the fraction of "uninsured afforders," and then recommends ways to reduce omitted variable bias and endogeneity bias.
Related Concept Videos
Bias in Epidemiological Studies
Confounding in Epidemiological Studies
Factors Affecting Illness
For instance, risk factors are connected to illness, disability,...
Strategies for Assessing and Addressing Confounding
Confounding can be addressed at both the design phase of a study and through analytical methods after data...
Methods Of Healthcare Delivery System
Managed Care System:
The managed care system is designed to control the cost while maintaining the quality of care. The patient's care from admission to discharge is planned by the primary care provider or the case manager, also known as the gatekeeper. In a managed care system, the number of care providers is limited...
Causality in Epidemiology