We compare and contrast the labor market and distributional impact of three common approaches to state and federal health insurance expansion: public insurance expansions, refundable tax credits for low income people, and employer and individual mandates. We draw on existing estimates from the...

Research in behavioral economics suggests that certain circumstances, such as large numbers of complex options or revisiting prior choices, can lead to decision errors. This paper explores the enrollment decisions of Medicare beneficiaries in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. During the time...

Puzzling results of a positive association between the number of physicians per capita and the level of fees for physician services have been reported in the literature. These results may be due to misspecification of econometric models and use of data aggre-gated across medical specialties. It...

The health sector is filled with institutions and decision-making circumstances that create friction in markets and cognitive errors by decision makers. This paper examines the potential contributions to health economics of the ideas of behavioral economics. The discussion presented here focuses...

We examine the price of treating episodes of acute phase major depression over the 1991-1996 time period. We combine data from a large retrospective medical claims data base (MarketScanTM, from the MedStat Group) with clinical literature and expert clinical opinion elicited from a two-state...

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...

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...

This study examines the relative impacts of human capital and market conditions on the economic rents associated with hospital privileges in the market for footcare. An empirical model of hospital privileges for podiatrists is formulated based on the Pauly-Redisch model of hospital behavior. The...

Medicare's Prospective Payment System (PPS) for hospitals was phased-in during the 1884 Federal Fiscal Year. While many providers of psychiatric inpatient care were exempted from PPS patients treated in general hospital beds outside of psychiatric units (scatterbeds) were not. This allows for an...

Generic drug prices have been the focus of much attention in recent years, with Congressional committees, executive agencies and private organizations all conducting investigations into the pricing patterns for generic drugs. Price spikes for selected old, off-patent drugs have also been widely...