Has U.S. health care for the elderly become more equitable during the past several decades? When inequality is measured by Medicare expenditures, the answer is yes. During 1987-2001, low income households experienced an increase of 78 percent ($2624) in per capita expenditures, double the...

We estimate the increment in Massachusetts Medicaid program costs attributable to smoking from December 20, 1991, to 1998. We describe how our methods improve upon earlier estimates of analogous costs at the national level. Current costs to the Massachusetts Medicaid program approximate the...

One of the benefits commonly claimed for expanded public health insurance is improved efficiency of medical care delivery, but this claim has little rigorous empirical support. We provide such support by assessing the impact of the Medicaid expansions over the 1983-1996 period on the incidence...

A substantial portion of the costs associated with, and the value to beneficiaries of, Social Security Disability Insurance is Medicare eligibility. However, the benefits of this eligibility can vary due to differences in state policies on supplemental Medicare coverage, also known as Medigap....

Medicare as a Secondary Payer (MSP) legislation requires employer-sponsored health insurance to be a primary payer for Medicare-eligible workers at firms with 20 or more employees. While the legislation was developed to better target Medicare services to individuals without access to...

This study examined the effects of education, income, and wealth on medical care expenditures in two Medicare managed care plans. The study also sought to elucidate the pathways through which socioeconomic status (SES) affects expenditures, including preferences for health and medical care and...

This paper identifies which types of patients and hospitals have abusive Medicare billings that are responsive to law enforcement. For a 20 percent random sample of elderly Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized from 1994-98 with one or more of six illnesses that are prone to abuse, we obtain...

During the last several years, government spending on drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses has increased at more than 30% per year, with the $3 billion in 2001 Medicaid expenditures exceeding spending in any other therapeutic category. This growth has been primarily...

In this paper we estimate the returns associated with the provision of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, by payer type (Medicare, HMO, etc.). Because reliable measures of prices and treatment costs are often unobserved, we seek to infer returns from hospital entry behavior. We...

The Medicare program is now an important source of transfers to elderly and disabled beneficiaries, and will continue to grow rapidly in the future. Because the Medicare program is so large in magnitude, it can have significant redistributional effects. In this paper, we measure the flow of...