Drug copayment coupons to reduce patient cost-sharing have become nearly ubiquitous for high-priced brand-name prescription drugs. Medicare bans such coupons on the grounds that they are kickbacks that induce utilization, but they are commonly used by commercially-insured enrollees. We estimate...

We empirically assess the potential financial impact of future gene therapies on the US economy. After identifying 109 late-stage gene therapy clinical trials currently underway, we estimate the number of new and existing patients with corresponding diseases to be treated by these gene...

We examine the impact of the opening of a new urgent care center (UCC) on health care costs and the utilization of care among nearby Medicare beneficiaries. We focus on 2006-2016, a period of rapid UCC expansion. We find that total Medicare spending rises when residents of a zip code are first...

The contribution of cigarette smoking to national health expenditures is thought to be large, but our current understanding of the effect of smoking on annual medical expenditures is limited to studies that use cross-sectional data to make comparisons of medical care expenditures between smokers...

Provider payments are the key determinant of insurance generosity within many health insurance programs covering low-income populations. This paper analyzes the effects of a large, federally-mandated provider payment increase for primary care services provided to low-income elderly and disabled...

Although economic theory suggests that the federal government can influence spending by states through subsidies to programs that states operate, no recent work has quantified the magnitude of this effect for Medicaid, the largest program of this type in the U.S. We find that Medicaid spending...

There is increasing interest in expanding Medicare health insurance coverage in the U.S., but it is not clear whether the current program is the right foundation on which to build. Traditional Medicare covers a uniformset of benefits for all income groups and provides more generous access to...

We use the design of Medicare's prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in coinsurance, or $10.40 per drug)...

We study Medicare's competitive bidding program (CBP) for durable medical equipment (DME). We exploit Medicare claims data to examine both prices and utilization, focusing on continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) devices to treat sleep apnea. We find that spending falls by 47.2% percent...