This paper discusses health economics as a behavioral science and as input into health policy and health services research. I illustrate the dual role with data on publications and citations of two leading health economics journals and three leading American health economists. Five important,...

This article describes the anatomy of health insurance. It begins by considering the optimal design of health insurance policies. Such policies must make tradeoffs appropriately between risk sharing on the one hand and agency problems such as moral hazard (the incentive of people to seek more...

We use a unique, nationally representative cross-national dataset to document the reduction in individuals' usage of routine non-emergency medical care in the midst of the economic crisis. A substantially larger fraction of Americans have reduced medical care than have individuals in Great...

Using micro data on virtually all of the drugs and diseases of over 500,000 people enrolled in Puerto Rico's Medicaid program, we examine the impact of the vintage (original FDA approval year) of drugs used to treat a patient on the patient's 3-year probability of survival, controlling for...

The health sector is filled with institutions and decision-making circumstances that create friction in markets and cognitive errors by decision makers. This paper examines the potential contributions to health economics of the ideas of behavioral economics. The discussion presented here focuses...