Assurance-maladie, accès aux soins et redistribution des revenus

We develop a "welfarist" model in which the collective demand for health insurance is mainly explained by a solvability motive : health insurance does not have for principal function to treat the risk aversion of solvent agents but to make it possible to individuals who are too poor to assume the cost of care to have access to those. This redistributive dimension of health insurance, curiously neglected in the literature, makes it possible to interpret differently the "perverse effects" of an integral insurance coverage. The growth of medical consumption that it involves does not necessarily explain by a "moral hazard" effect and there is not loss of collective well-being ascribable to an "excess" of insurance coverage.