More moral hazard

Since I'm on the topic of moral hazard, here's an interesting study from 2009 about the moral hazard of holding health insurance: it'll make you more unhealthy.

In the aptly-titled working paper Does Health Insurance Make You Fat?, Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya and three co-authors looked at results of an experiment where Americans were randomly given different levels of health insurance (or no health insurance at all). They found that people with health insurance tended to gain weight. Private insurance policies increase the average person's body mass index by 1.3 points, while public insurance increases it by 2.1 points.

Hockey visors and moral hazard

In its Feb. 1 issue, The Hockey News makes the case for mandatory visors in the NHL. Currently, visors are optional, but the magazine argues that making them mandatory would cut down on eye injuries.

"The players would benefit from improved safety in the workplace. Mandatory visors wouldn't guarantee the elimination of catastrophic eye injuries, but the evidence suggests it'd be pretty darn close," writes Editor-in-Chief Jason Kay.

Writer John Grigg brings up the very scary eye injury suffered by then-Leafs defenseman Bryan Berard in 2000. In analyzing the current trend of more players wearing visors, Grigg argues: "[I]f current trends continue, the NHL will have fewer and fewer reminders of [Berard's injury]."