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...

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...

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...

Although chronically ill individuals need protection against high medical expenses, they often have difficulty obtaining adequate insurance coverage due to medical underwriting practices used to classify and price risks and to define and limit coverage for individuals and groups. Using data from...

This paper compares and contrasts outpatient pharmaceutical policies for the elderly in seven OECD nations: Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each country is facing an increasing financial burden due to rapidly growing numbers of elderly...

We analyze peer effects in sleeping behavior using a representative sample of U.S. teenagers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. The sampling design of the survey causes the conventional 2SLS estimator to be inconsistent. We extend the NLS estimator in Wang and Lee...