The demand for health insurance in a multirisk context

Using a model of bivariate decision under risk, we analyse the health insurance demand when there are two sources of risk: a health risk and an uninsurable one. We examine how the uninsurable risk affects the coverage of the health risk. We show that the determinants of the demand for health insurance are not only the correlation between the health and uninsurable risks as shown by Doherty and Schlesinger (1983a) and the variation of the marginal utility of wealth with respect to the health status (Rey, 2003) but also the way in which the occurrence of the uninsurable risk affects the marginal utility of wealth.