To address these concerns, we devised survey questions specific ally designed to elicit the expressed willingness to pay among the
uninsured for a comprehensive health plan. Existing data on the
uninsured are generally limited in part because many respondents
must be screened in order to yield a sample of uninsured people
large enough to generate precise estimates, given that more than 80
percent of Americans are covered by some for mofhealth insurance.
Fortunately, for a two-week period during the summer of 2008,
the Gallup Poll included our questions in their ongoing survey of
1000 individuals a day. We asked respondents whether they would purchase a comprehensive health plan for a given monthly premium,
and then lowered the price in several stages for those
who initially said they would not purchase it. To the best of
our knowledge, our dataset is the first to elicit self-reported
willingness-to-pay for health insurance among a large sample of
uninsured Americans