Because the optimal level of medical malpractice liability depends on the incentives provided by the health insurance system, the rise of managed care in the 1990s may affect the relationship between liability reform and defensive medicine. In this paper, we assess empirically the extent to...

We examine HMO participation and enrollment in the Medicare risk market for the years 1990 to 1995. We develop a profit- maximization model of HMO behavior, which explicitly considers potential linkages between an HMO's production decision in the commercial enrollee market and its participation...

By 1993, over 70% of all Americans with health insurance were enrolled in some form of managed care plan. The term managed care encompasses a diverse array of institutional arrangements, which combine various sets of mechanisms, that, in turn, have changed over time. The chapter reviews these...

This paper is concerned with the economics of mental health. We argue that mental health economics is like health economics only more so: uncertainty and variation in treatments are greater; the assumption of patient self-interested behavior is more dubious; response to financial incentives such...

Exploiting random assignment of Medicaid beneficiaries to managed care plans, we identify plan-specific effects on healthcare utilization. Auto-assignment to the lowest-spending plan generates 30% lower spending than if the same enrollee were assigned to the highest-spending plan, despite...

We analyze the role of three aspects of HMO market structure -- HMO penetration, HMO plan concentration, and HMO for-profit share on explaining hospital cost and revenue growth during the HMO expansion period (1994-1999) and backlash period (2000-2005). We find that HMO penetration effects...

This paper investigates the impact of Medicare HMO penetration on the medical care expenditures incurred by Medicare fee-for-service enrollees. We find that increasing penetration leads to reduced health care spending on fee-for-service beneficiaries. In particular, a one percentage point...

We analyze the effect of a decision support tool designed to help physicians detect and correct medical "missteps". The data comes from a randomized trial of the technology on a population of commercial HMO patients. The key findings are that the new information technology lowers average charges...