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Licensed to Ill

How do health insurance markets work?

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Licensed to Ill

How do health insurance markets work?

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Health insurance reform is one of the most important issues in the United States. It’s also one of the most contentious. Years after Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, feelings are still heated.

In this lesson, students use percents to calculate the value of insurance to people with different health profiles, analyze the insurance market from the perspectives of both consumer and company, and debate the long-term impacts of a range of policies.

REAL WORLD TAKEAWAYS

  • The expected value of insurance to someone depends on how likely they are to need it and the cost of the services it covers.
  • An insurance company can predict their payouts based on the probability its customers will need services and the cost of those services. They will set prices to cover those costs.

MATH OBJECTIVES

  • Calculate expected value and use it to solve real-world problems
  • Solve real-world problems using percents

Appropriate most times as students are developing conceptual understanding.
Grade 7
Probability & Statistics
Grade 7
Probability & Statistics
Content Standards 7.RP.3 Use proportional relationships to solve multistep ratio and percent problems. Examples: simple interest, tax, markups and markdowns, gratuities and commissions, fees, percent increase and decrease, percent error. 7.NS.3 Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving the four operations with rational numbers. 7.SP.5 Understand that the probability of a chance event is a number between 0 and 1 that expresses the likelihood of the event occurring. Larger numbers indicate greater likelihood. A probability near 0 indicates an unlikely event, a probability around 1/2 indicates an event that is neither unlikely nor likely, and a probability near 1 indicates a likely event.
Mathematical Practices MP.1 Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. MP.2 Reason abstractly and quantitatively. MP.3 Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. MP.4 Model with mathematics. MP.8 Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

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