At the invitation of Prof. Shuaizhang Feng, Dean of the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Prof. Hanming Fang delivered a virtual lecture entitled Long-Term Health Insurance: Theory Meets Evidence on 29 March.

        Virtual lecture of Prof. Fang

Prof. Hanming Fang is the Joseph M. Cohen Term Professor of Economics in University of Pennsylvania. He is an applied microeconomist with broad theoretical and empirical interests focusing on public economics. His research has focused on the economic analysis of discrimination; insurance markets, particularly life insurance and health insurance; and health care, including Medicare. He has served as co-editor for the Journal of Public Economics and International Economic Review, and associate editor in numerous journals, including the American Economic Review. In 2008, Professor Fang was awarded the 17th Kenneth Arrow Prize by the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) for his research on the sources of advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market. 

In the presentation, Prof. Fang pointed out that long-term health insurance constitutes an alternative to community-rated short-term contracts with an individual mandate to insure policyholders against contemporaneous health expenditure shocks and future reclassification risk. He then presented his co-authored working paper examining German long-term health insurance (GLTHI) from a life-cycle perspective. The study found out that GLTHI achieves a high level of welfare against several benchmarks. The research also conducted counterfactual policy simulations to illustrate the welfare consequences of integrating GLTHI into a hybrid insurance system similar to the current system in the United States. 

The lecture ended with heated discussions among Prof. Fang and participants on topics such as moral hazards of the long-term health insurance and the reasons for which it is not yet widespread worldwide. Over 100 participants joined the lecture.

IESR invites regularly globally renowned scholars to deliver lectures and share their insights on particular topics.