Designing and analyzing healthcare insurance policies to reduce cost and prevent the spread of seasonal influenza

Getting seasonal flu vaccines and seeking medical treatments are two effective strategies to prevent the spread of seasonal influenza. However, less than half of Americans received flu vaccines in the 2014-2015 flu season. A high cost-sharing rate in healthcare insurance policies results in few patients to visit doctors, leading to slow recovery rate. In this paper, we design insurance policies, including vaccination incentives and cost-sharing, to encourage the insurants to receive a flu vaccine and prevent the spread of seasonal influenza. Dynamic interaction between a single insurer and multiple insurants is formulated as a Stackelberg vaccination game and agent-based modeling is implemented to simulate the spread of flu in a population under different insurance policies. Simulation and experimental results indicate that the proposed mechanism can effectively improve vaccination behavior and maintain low infection rates even with a highly contagious flu.