Healthcare Economist February 13, 2025
One reason are the administrative obstacles and frictions that eligible individuals have to overcome to receive the public services. A paper by Herd and Moynihan (2025) in the Journal of Economic Perspectives provides an overview of the literature.
Such burdens are the experience of policy implementation as onerous, and arise via learning costs (knowing about the existence of and requirements of public services), compliance costs (time and effort spent dealing with bureaucratic demands, such as paperwork and documentation), and psychological costs (emotional responses to citizen-state interactions). Such frictions can substantially limit eligible peoples’ access to public services they want, would benefit from, and are legally entitled to receive. Those with the fewest resources, and the greatest needs, may struggle...