March 2001 (Revised from May 2000). During the 1980s and 1990s there were great increases of health insurance coverage for poor children through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and extended Medicaid eligibility. Problems remain for the small number of children with serious...

December 2000 (Revised from September 2000). Background: The economic costs of depression are significant, both the direct medical costs of care and the indirect costs of lost productivity. Empirical studies of antidepressant cost-effectiveness suggest that the use of selective serotonin...

Jonathan Gruber was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort, and in 2006 became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort. He delivered this lecture on October 2, 2009, and his references are to Congressional bills...

One is always hesitant to speak about the future. A famous philosopher from New York, Yogi Berra, said "Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future," and I have some trepidation about doing so now. There is also the difficulty of understanding what really has happened in the...

Just as managed care has changed utilization and incentives in other parts of health care, there is a whole set of incentives built around long-term care that really matter. For example, if nursing homes have a financial incentive to hospitalize people with certain health conditions, then in the...

Using data from the 1998 wave of the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the effect of social interactions on the health insurance choices of the elderly. We find that having more social interactions, as measured by contacts with friends and neighbors, reduces the likelihood of enrolling in...

Classic epidemiology looks at what happens to people who live in a defined region over time. For example, birth rate, the number of births that occur among populations over a year, is a common statistics that we're all familiar with. Since the early 1990s we have conducted research at Dartmouth...

There is a fundamentally new dynamic in American health care, one that has yet to be fully experienced but that threatens to leave a large portion of the American population without access to the quality health care they have received in the past. While the federal government has not completely...

The health care system in the United States has been experiencing rapid change for decades. Beginning after World War II, the health care system grew and expanded. Change was driven by advances in technology, shifting demographics, and increases in the supply of physicians and hospitals, all...

Prescription drug expenditures make up less than 10 percent of total personal health care expenditures in the United States, but over the last decade the amount that Americans spend on prescription drugs has grown much faster than any other component of personal health care. For example, between...