The paper develops frequency distribution of annual health expense for a variety of family compositions. The basic data resource was a sample of claims for a large group of federal employees in 1977. The primary data were compared in several aspects against three other sources of reference data...

While efforts to improve the health of the uninsured have focused on demand side policies such as increasing insurance coverage, supply side changes may be equally important. Yet there is little direct evidence on the effect of policies designed to increase the supply of Medicaid services to the...

Medicare overbilling refers to the phenomenon that providers report more and/or higher-intensity service codes than actually delivered to receive higher Medicare reimbursement. We propose a novel and easy-to-implement approach to detect potential overbilling based on the hours worked implied by...

We demonstrate Medicare's influence on private insurers' payments for physicians' services. Using a large administrative change in payments for surgical versus medical care, we find that private prices follow Medicare's lead. A $1 change in Medicare's fees moved private prices by $1.16. A second...

This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to understand the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, costs and quality. Our review reveals...

This chapter provides an overview of the German long-term care insurance. We document care needs and wellbeing of the elderly population. Moreover, we provide a detailed description of the German long-term care institutions (sources of finance and types of benefits), the professional care work...

Who bears the consequences of administrative problems in healthcare? We use data on repeated interactions between a large sample of U.S. physicians and many different insurers to document the complexity of healthcare billing, and estimate its economic costs for doctors and consequences for...

The objective of this study is to use data from the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs (NS-CSHCN) to test whether Medicaid physician fees are correlated with access to health services and adequacy of insurance coverage among CSHCN. We use a difference-in-differences...

We examine how the amount a physician is paid influences who they are willing to see. Exploiting large, exogenous changes in Medicaid reimbursement rates, we find that increasing payments for new patient office visits reduces reports of providers turning away beneficiaries: closing the gap in...