Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.

Ed Kelly is on a mission to help American families. They are grossly underinsured with their current life insurance coverage, and something must be done about it, soon. In this book, Ed exposes the 10 myths that most consumers and their current advisors hold about life insurance. Once these myths are dispelled, then the mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, insurance agents and financial planners can all move on to address the truth about Time Diversification and Tax Diversification. This book is a call for Americans to take responsibility for themselves and the real risks we all face. While most people can think of only one reason to own life insurance (to provide money for a survivor), Ed shows there are actually 1000 reasons to own life insurance, from cradle to grave. Many of these are driven by the tax advantages inherent in a life insurance policy. His mission is to drive you to a better conversation and a better meeting with your financial professional. This book will help you see life insurance from a new philosophical and practical perspective.

In this article, we examine the benefits that accrue to policyholders and incumbent insurers from an active secondary market for life insurance policies. We begin by examining the benefits of secondary markets in the home mortgage and catastrophic risk insurance industries as points of comparison for the benefits of the secondary market for life insurance policies. Next, we outline the economic theory of a life insurance market both before and after the introduction of a secondary market. Although competition among insurance companies in the primary market leads to reasonably competitive surrender values given normal health, surrender values based on normal health do not appropriately compensate individuals with impaired life expectancies for the resulting appreciation of their policies. Without an active secondary market, the equilibrium quantity of impaired policies that is surrendered is inefficiently low. Incumbent insurance carriers have no incentive to eliminate this inefficiency because they hold monopsony power over the repurchase of impaired policies. Viatical and life settlement firms erode this monopsony power. Finally, we examine the benefits of an active secondary market for life insurance policies to policyholders and incumbent insurers in the primary market. The magnitude of the benefits is positively correlated to the quantity of coverage sold to life settlement firms and to the improvement in the terms of accelerated death benefits offered by incumbent carriers. The emergence of the secondary market for life insurance policies has been pro-competitive and pro-consumer. Lawmakers should therefore design regulations that encourage, rather than dissuade, participation and investment in this secondary market.