Evaluating the Impact of Deductible Levels on Health Insurance Expenses

A common problem for actuaries is to determine the impact of changes deductibles on expense to the insurer. This article uses the method of moments to estimate deductible impacts under the assumption of a lognormal distribution of health care expenses for utilizers. The problems of moral hazard and mixed expense distributions are also discussed. An example using statistics from the Rand Insurance Study is presented to demonstrate the estimation of a hypothetical change in deductible. A short-cut computational method for evaluating the impact of deductible changes for any continuous loss distribution is also presented.