The purpose of this paper is to examine issues related to the coverage of preventive care under national health insurance. Four specific kinds of medical care services are included under the rubric of preventive care: prenatal care; pediatric care, dental care, and preventive physicians' services...

During health crises, like COVID-19, individuals are inundated with messages promoting health-preserving behavior. Does additional light-touch messaging by a credible individual change behavior? Do the features of the message matter? To answer this, we conducted a large-scale messaging campaign...

I look at prevention through an economic lens and make three main points. First, those advocating preventive measures are often asked how much money a given measure saves. This question is misguided. Rather preventive measures can be thought of as insurance, with a certain cost in the present...

We examine the effects of state health insurance mandates requiring coverage of screening mammograms. We find robust evidence that mammography mandates significantly increased mammography screenings by 4.5-25 percent. Effects are larger for women with less than a high school degree in states...

Sedentary lifestyles, obesity, and obesity-related chronic diseases have become increasingly common among U.S. adults, posing a major health policy challenge. While individuals may be interested in exercising more to reduce these health risks, they often have difficultly forming long-term...

We examine the effect of gaining prescription drug insurance as a result of Medicare Part D on use of prescription drugs, use of other medical services, and health for a nationally representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries. Given the heightened importance of prescription drugs for those...

We use unique data from an insurer that exclusively offers high-deductible, "consumer-directed" health plans to identify the effect of plan features, notably the spending account, on health care spending. Our results show that the marginal dollar in the spending account is entirely spent on...

We investigate how the employment-based health insurance system in the U.S. affects individuals' life-cycle health-care decisions. We take the viewpoint that health is a form of human capital that affects workers' productivities on the job, and derive implications of employees' turnover on the...

The obesity rate in the United States has risen significantly in the past few decades. While a number of economic causes for the rise in obesity have been explored, little attention has been on the role of health insurance per se. This paper examines obesity in the context of a model where...

In the past few decades, some measures of population risk have improved, while others have deteriorated. Understanding the health of the population requires integrating these different trends. We compare the risk factor profile of the population in the early 1970s with that of the population in...