The conventional model for the use of cost effectiveness analysis for health programs involves determining whether the cost per unit of effectiveness of the program is better than some socially determined maximum acceptable cost per unit of effectiveness. If a program is better, the policy...

What is the nature of the industrial organization of the market for physician services? Is the market 'competitive?' Are there pareto-relevant market failures, such that there is room for welfare improving policies? Economists have devoted a great deal of attention to this market, but it remains...

Recent work has shown that, in the presence of moral hazard, balanced budget Nash equilibria in groups are not pareto-optimal. This work shows that when agents misperceive the effects of their actions on the joint outcome, there exist a set of sharing rules which balance the budget and lead to a...

The model developed in this paper is a model of internal non-price competition among members of a cooperative firm. Members take price arid income distribution method as given, but perceive a positive relationship between their own production of quality and the flow of consumers to them, when...

The goal of this paper is to identify key issues concerning the nature of competition in health care markets and its impacts on quality and social welfare and to identify pertinent findings from the theoretical and empirical literature on this topic. The theoretical literature in economics on...

The purpose of this paper is to present estimates of production functions for hospitals in which a measure of the level of physician input is utilized. Since no data on the total number of hours worked by non-salaried physicians is available for a large sample of U.S. hospitals, alternative...

Research has shown that higher cost-sharing lowers health care spending levels but less is known about whether cost-sharing also affects spending growth. From 2002 to 2016, private insurance deductibles more than tripled in magnitude. We use data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid...

Do consumers show a strong bias toward low deductible insurance plans, as many field studies imply? This paper reports on a controlled experiment intended to see whether subjects have a predisposition toward such plans and whether that preference is consistent when their default plan and...

The growth of health care spending has been a longstanding policy concern. Over the years, several innovations have been proposed to lower levels of health care spending; however, their impact has been limited and not sustained over time. Costly new technology, while often an improvement to...

In many developing countries the proportion of health care spending paid out of pocket is about half of all spending or more. This study examines the distribution of such spending by income and care type, and the variation in spending about its expected value, in order to see whether voluntary...