We present a simple graphical framework to illustrate the potential welfare gains from a "top-up" health insurance policy requiring patients to pay the incremental price for more expensive treatment options. We apply this framework to breast cancer treatments, where lumpectomy with radiation...

Decades of evidence reveal a complicated relationship between mammograms and mortality. Mammograms may detect deadly cancers early, but they may also lead to the diagnosis and potentially fatal treatment of cancers that would never progress to cause symptoms. I provide a brief history of the...

Much research has studied the health effects of expanding insurance coverage to low-income people, but there is less work on the direct provision of care to the uninsured. We study the two largest federal programs aimed at reducing breast and cervical cancer among uninsured women in the US: one...

Debates over whether and when to recommend screening for a potential disease focus on the causal impact of screening for a typical individual covered by the recommendation, who may differ from the typical individual who responds to the recommendation. We explore this distinction in the context...

Medicare is a large government health insurance program in the United States which covers about 60 million people. This paper analyzes the effects of Medicare insurance on health for a group of people in urgent need of medical care: people with cancer. We used a regression discontinuity design...

Current mammography guidelines reflect evidence that mammography could be harmful on average through the overdiagnosis of breast cancers that would not eventually cause symptoms in the long term. To inform targeting within these guidelines, I investigate whether some women are more likely to...

I investigate whether the types of cancer (breast, colon, lung, etc.) subject to greater penetration of new ideas had larger subsequent survival gains and mortality reductions, controlling for changing incidence. I use the MEDLINE/PubMED database, which contains more than 23 million references...

The concentration of healthcare spending at the end of life is widely documented but poorly understood. To gain insight, we focus on patients newly diagnosed with cancer. They display the familiar pattern: even among cancer patients with similar initial prognoses, monthly spending in the year...

We examine gender and race differences in education-mortality trends among 25-64 year olds in the United States from 2001-2018. The data indicate that the relationships are heterogeneous with larger mortality reductions for less educated non-Hispanic blacks than other races and mixed results at...

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...