This paper presents a new approach to organizing universal health insurance. First, the government divides the entire population into many large groups. Then, the government creates a federal health insurance system (HealthFed), modeled on the Federal Reserve System, to fill the role now played by the benefits office of a large firm. The HealthFed would create a short menu of alternatives, solicit bids for insuring the entire group, and price alternatives. There would be redistribution between groups and pricing of alternatives to reflect optimal social insurance principles. There would be no connection between health insurance and employment.

The authors analyze a continuous time model with a Walrasian labor market and a random search retail market with prices set on a take-it or leave-it basis. The equilibrium distribution of money holdings is the asymptotic steady state of this stochastic process. There is a unique uniform price steady state equilibrium. The faster the search process the higher the absolute price, wage, and real wage. The instantaneous effect of an equal per capita infusion of money is to raise the price, wage, real wage, and transactions rate. The immediate post-infusion price and wage can overshoot their new asymptotic values.

October 1983