IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/3723.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Income Tax as Insurance: The Casualty Loss and Medical Expense Deductions and the Exclusion of the Medical Insurance Premiums

Author

Listed:
  • Louis Kaplow

Abstract

Whether personal income tax deductions are appropriate refinements to the concept of income or unwarranted tax expenditures continues to be the subject of debate. The casualty loss and medical expense deductions are frequently justified on the ground that ability to pay is reduced by largely unavoidable expenditures or losses. This article reconsiders the question taking account of the availability of private insurance, which is in fact widespread for relevant losses in both areas. When individuals can insure, the second level of insurance implicit in the casualty loss and medical expense deductions distorts consumption choices and insurance decisions. In particular, individuals may be more exposed to losses because of tax deductions commonly believed to mitigate them. Given the option, individuals would prefer a regime that eliminated the deductions and offered correspondingly lower tax rates.

Suggested Citation

  • Louis Kaplow, 1991. "The Income Tax as Insurance: The Casualty Loss and Medical Expense Deductions and the Exclusion of the Medical Insurance Premiums," NBER Working Papers 3723, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3723
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3723.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jonathan Gruber & James M. Poterba, 1996. "Tax Subsidies to Employer-Provided Health Insurance," NBER Chapters, in: Empirical Foundations of Household Taxation, pages 135-168, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Cinzia Di Novi & Anna Marenzi & Dino Rizzi, 2018. "Do healthcare tax credits help poor-health individuals on low incomes?," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 19(2), pages 293-307, March.
    3. Louis Kaplow, 2003. "Transition Policy: A Conceptual Framework," NBER Working Papers 9596, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Rachel J. Huang & Larry Y. Tzeng, 2007. "Optimal Tax Deductions for Net Losses Under Private Insurance With an Upper Limit," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 74(4), pages 883-893, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3723. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.