We are the first to document that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) caseworker behavior impacts program receipt, likely due to differing levels of helpfulness in navigating the complicated application process. We use the conditional random assignment of caseworkers as an...

We study the effects of "balance billing", i.e., allowing physicians to charge a fee from patients in addition to the fee paid by Medicare. First, we show that on pure efficiency grounds the optimal Medicare fee under balance billing is zero. An active Medicare policy thus can only be justified...

Derzeit ist Deutschland europaweit das einzige Land mit einem Nebeneinander von zwei Systemen der Kranken-Vollversicherung. Die demographische Entwicklung verbunden mit einer fragwürdigen Akquisitionsstrategie, die Finanzkrise sowie die Einführung der Versicherungspfl icht hatten vor allem die...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

We estimate the role of firms in worker health care utilization. Using linked administrative data on Austrian workers from 1998-2018, we exploit mobility between firms to estimate how much a firm contributes to worker-level differences in utilization in a setting with non-employer provided...

Many public programs let individuals choose between publicly provided benefits and a subsidized private alternative. We investigate the determinants of health insurance choice in Medicare--a setting with vast geographic variation in the share of individuals selecting the public option versus...

The Medicare hospice program is intended to provide palliative care to terminal patients, but patients with long stays in hospice are highly profitable, motivating concerns about overuse among the Alzheimer's and Dementia (ADRD) population in the rapidly growing for-profit sector. We provide the...

This chapter summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of...

The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We suggest that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficiencies and are not likely to facilitate...