CU to Host Economics Lecture Focused on Health Insurance
Bloomsburg, PA (10/15/2025) — University of Chicago economics professor Matthew J. Notowidigdo will give a lecture, "What Does Health Insurance Do?" on Tuesday, Oct. 21, at 2 p.m. in Commonwealth University-Bloomsburg's Haas Center for the Arts, Mitrani Hall.
The lecture, part of CU's Economics Lecture Series, will also be live-streamed, and the link will be available at www.commonwealthu.edu/economics-lectures.
Notowidigdo will discuss how health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. He argues that health insurance also confers benefits to health care providers, because the uninsured often pay only a small share of their medical expenses. The prevalence of this "uncompensated care" for the uninsured helps explain the limited take-up of heavily-subsidized public health insurance, which is often interpreted as evidence that public health insurance recipients value formal health insurance at substantially less than the cost to insurers of providing that coverage. The Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion has been a useful laboratory for studying all of these economic issues.
Notowidigdo is the David McDaniel Keller Professor of Economics and Business and Public Policy Fellow at the University of Chicago. In labor economics, his research has focused on understanding the causes and consequences of long-term unemployment and the economic effects of unemployment insurance over the business cycle. Notowidigdo's research in health economics focuses on the effects of public health insurance on labor supply and the effects of income on health spending. He is currently working with several state governments on large-scale randomized experiments of existing social insurance programs.
Notowidigdo holds a BS in economics, a BS in computer engineering, a MEng in computer science, and a PhD in economics. He is currently a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, an Associate Editor at the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and a member of the Board of Editors at American Economic Journal - Economic Policy.
For more information about the lectures, contact Mehdi Haririan, professor of economics, at 570-389-4682.
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