Issue 4: June 2004

Expanding the Individual Health Insurance Market: Lessons from the State Reforms of the 1990s

Many policy-makers support expanding health insurance coverage by providing tax credits to individuals with low or modest incomes to help them purchase private health insurance. How a credit is used and who benefits the most from it will be affected by how the individual insurance market operates and is regulated.

Drawing on lessons of state insurance market reforms of the 1990s, this synthesis examines whether reforms could be used to make individual insurance more available and affordable today.

Some Key Questions Addressed in This Issue:

• What individual market reforms did states enact and why did they enact them?
• Did state individual market reforms make insurance more available and affordable?
• Could reforms be used to make individual insurance more available and affordable today?

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