The Affordable Care Act introduces or expands taxes on incomes and full-time employment, beginning in 2014. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the new full-time employment taxes from the perspective of a household budget constraint, measure their magnitude, and assess their likely...

In many federally-subsidized insurance markets, insurers are subsidized on the basis of enrollee characteristics; in principle, subsidies that are "risk adjusted" in this way compensate insurers for ex ante differences in expected cost. Between 2010 and 2011, the subsidies in Medicare Part D...

The tendency of health care expenditures on the elderly to grow about 4 percent per annum more rapidly than the Gross Domestic Product could plunge the nation into a severe economic and social crisis within two decades. This paper describes recent growth in age-sex-specific health care...

Two of the three elements of the ACA's "premium stabilization program," reinsurance and risk corridors, are set to expire in 2017, leaving risk adjustment alone to protect plans against risk of high-cost cases. This paper considers potential modifications of the HHS risk adjustment methodology...

In order to encourage entry and lower prices, most regulated markets for health insurance include policies that seek to reduce the uncertainty faced by insurers. In addition to risk adjustment of premiums paid to plans, the Health Insurance Marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act...

Governments contract with private firms to provide a wide range of services. While a large body of previous work has estimated the effects of that contracting, surprisingly little has investigated how those effects vary with the generosity of the contract. In this paper we examine this issue in...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

Over the last decade, the U.S. Medicare program has added new billing codes to enhance the financial rewards for Chronic Care Management and Transitional Care Management. We analyze the effects of introducing these new billing codes. First, we provide evidence on the adoption of the new codes by...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...