The Affordable Care Act Marketplaces were introduced in 2014 as part of a reform of the U.S. individual health insurance market. While the individual market represents a small slice of the U.S. population, it has historically been the market segment with the lowest rates of take-up and greatest...

Enrollment in one public benefit program often affects enrollment in others. We study life-course spillovers by examining how access to publicly subsidized health insurance prior to age 65 affects public benefit choices at the age of Medicare eligibility. We use administrative data to examine...

Prices in government and employer-sponsored health insurance markets only partially reflect insurers' expected costs of coverage for different enrollees. This can create inefficient distortions when consumers self-select into plans. We develop a simple model to study this problem and estimate it...

The goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage through a combination of mandates, subsidies, marketplaces, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine...

The prevalence of obesity has been rising dramatically in the U.S., leading to poor health and rising health care expenditures. The role of policy in addressing rising rates of obesity, however, is controversial. Policy recommendations for interventions intended to influence body weight...

To explore how well the safety net performs at eliminating differences in diagnosis and treatment of insured and uninsured women with breast cancer, we compared insured and uninsured women treated in a safety net setting. Controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, uninsured women are more...

As an empirical example of this externality, we analyze the innovation induced by the obesity epidemic. Obesity is associated with an increase in the incidence of many diseases. The induced innovation hypothesis is that an increase in the incidence of a disease will increase technological...

Some states have implemented community rating regulations to limit the extent to which premiums in the individual health insurance market can vary with a person?s health status. Community rating and guaranteed issues laws were passed with hopes of increasing access to affordable insurance for...

We provide strong evidence of advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market, and analyze its sources. Using Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) data, we find that, conditional on controls for the price of Medigap, medical expenditures for senior citizens with Medigap coverage...

While many believe that an individual's health plays an important role in both their willingness and ability to obtain health insurance in the employment-based setting, relatively little agreement exists on the extent to which health status affects coverage rates, particularly for those with...