Does Canada's publicly funded, single payer health care system deliver better health outcomes and distribute health resources more equitably than the multi-payer heavily private U.S. system? We show that the efficacy of health care systems cannot be usefully evaluated by comparisons of infant...

Missed clinic appointments present a significant burden to health care through disruption of care, inefficient use of staff time and wasted clinical resources. Short message service (SMS) appointment reminders show promise to improve clinics' management through timely appointment cancellations...

Early twentieth century efforts to overhaul the quality of medical education in the United States (principally between 1905 and 1915 - the "Flexner Report Era") led to a steep decline in the number of medical schools and medical school graduates. In this paper, we examine the consequences of...

This paper examines the impact of reducing the administrative fragmentation of billing and payment, one commonly cited cause of inefficiency in US health care. We study a Medicare reform that consolidated billing processes across service types, using its staggered rollout and hospitals' prior...

We study the drivers of geographic variation in US health care utilization, using an empirical strategy that exploits migration of Medicare patients to separate the role of demand and supply factors. Our approach allows us to account for demand differences driven by both observable and...

Adverse behavioral risk factors contribute to a large share of deaths. We examine the effects on life expectancy (LE) and quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of changes in six major behavioral risk factors over the 1960-2010 period: smoking, obesity, heavy alcohol use, and unsafe use of...