In health care, cost sharing occurs when patients pay for a portion of

health care costs Health, according to the World Health Organization, is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity".World Health Organization. (2006)''Constitution of the World Health Organiz ...

not covered by health insurance. The "out-of-pocket" payment varies among healthcare plans and depends on whether or not the patient chooses to use a healthcare provider who is contracted with the healthcare plan's network. Examples of out-of-pocket payments involved in cost sharing include

copay A copayment or copay (called a gap in Australian English) is a fixed amount for a covered service, paid by a patient to the provider of service before receiving the service. It may be defined in an insurance policy and paid by an insured person ea ...

deductible In an insurance policy, the deductible (in British English, the excess) is the amount paid out of pocket by the policy holder before an insurance provider will pay any expenses. In general usage, the term ''deductible'' may be used to describe o ...

s, and

coinsurance In insurance, co-insurance or coinsurance is the splitting or spreading of risk among multiple parties. In the United States In the U.S. insurance market, co-insurance is the joint assumption of risk between the insurer and the insured. In titl ...

. In accounting, cost sharing or matching means that portion of project or program costs not borne by the funding agency. It includes all contributions, including cash and in-kind, that a recipient makes to an award. If the award is federal, only acceptable non-federal costs qualify as cost sharing and must conform to other necessary and reasonable provisions to accomplish the program objectives. Cost sharing effort is included in the calculation of total committed effort. Effort is defined as the portion of time spent on a particular activity expressed as a percentage of the individual's total activity for the institution. Cost sharing can be audited and must be allowable under cost principles and verifiable to records. A

cost-sharing mechanism In economics and mechanism design, a cost-sharing mechanism is a process by which several agents decide on the scope of a public product or service, and how much each agent should pay for it. Cost-sharing is easy when the marginal cost is constant ...

is a

truthful mechanism In game theory, an asymmetric game where players have private information is said to be strategy-proof or strategyproof (SP) if it is a weakly-dominant strategy for every player to reveal his/her private information, i.e. given no information about ...

for deciding what agents should be served by a public project, and how much each of them should pay.

Sources

* Dehez, P., & Tellone, D. (2013)
Data games: Sharing public goods with exclusion
''Journal of Public Economic Theory'', ''15''(4), 654-673.

References

Health economics Health insurance {{econ-term-stub