Health Insurance and Life Style Choices: Identifying the Ex Ante Moral Hazard

There is extensive debate in the literature about the practical significance of the concept of ex-ante moral hazard. This paper uses data from the 1999-2003 PSID waves to estimate a structural model of individual choice of insurance coverage and four life style related decisions: heavy smoking, heavy drinking, sedentarism and obesity. The results show that health insurance has significant incentive effects on life style choices, increasing the propensity to heavy smoking, sedentarism and obesity. Somewhat surprisingly, however, health insurance decreases the propensity to heavy drinking. There is also significant correlation among the errors of each equation. The results might also have implications for the design of health financing policies.