Please join us for our next Rutgers Institute for Health Brown Bag Seminar with Dr. Katherine Hempstead, Senior Policy Adviser at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Hempstead will discuss her new book: Uncovered: The Story of Insurance in America.

Please join us in Conference Room 102 at IFH: 112 Paterson Street in New Brunswick. A Zoom link is below for those joining virtually.

About Katherine: Katherine Hempstead is a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She works on healthcare issues, mostly those related to health insurance, costs, and access to care. In her work in the policy unit, she seeks to inform policy discussions at the federal and state level by making data and analyses widely available. She is particularly interested making new sources of data that have the potential to inform policy available to researchers and the public sector.

About Uncovered: This book is a history of the insurance business and the regulation of that business in the United States. It begins by describing the early days of life, fire, and casualty insurance and the development of state regulation in the late nineteenth century, after a Supreme Court ruling exempted the insurance business from federal regulation. From the outset, insurers adopted a quasi-public persona, emphasized the social benefits of their work, and sought to control the terms by which they interacted with government. Early political leaders agreed that insurers played an important role in the largely voluntary social safety net. Yet insurance is a business, and over time, periodic crises in life, fire, health, auto, and liability insurance highlighted gaps between the coverage that insurers were willing to provide and what the public demanded. The Depression was an inflection point, after which the federal government began to assume a greater role in the provision of insurance. Insurers enthusiastically pursued the growing business of employee benefits. A Supreme Court decision in 1944 created an opportunity to undo the state-based system, but Congress instead chose to preserve the status quo. Yet there are significant constraints on the ability of state regulators to solve important problems in insurance markets, as was made clear by cyclical problems in auto and property markets. As the twentieth century progressed, insurers and government have become interdependent; government serves as a financial backstop and relies on the insurance industry to participate in markets, including many that are publicly funded.