Since the inception of Medicare Part D in 2006, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and regulatory changes have led to increased concentration and reduced plan variety in the standalone prescription drug plan (PDP) portion of the market. We examine how this industry consolidation affects Medicare...

Technological innovation in medical services can improve health, but its ability to reach patients often depends on price signals for downstream providers, which can also be discordant across production inputs. We examine such a context when Medicare sharply revises facility fees--while holding...

I demonstrate that to achieve dynamic efficiency, the optimal share of total surplus that a social payer should transfer to an innovating industry for a current asset depends on the marginal product of investment and the share of profits invested by the industry on the current asset and not on...

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...

This paper provides the first quantitative economic models of pharmacy benefit management regulation. The price-theoretic models allow for various market frictions and imperfections including market power, coordination costs, tax distortions, and incomplete innovation incentives. A rigorous...

Health plan payment systems with community-rated premiums typically include risk adjustment, risk sharing or both to compensate insurers for predictable profits (on young and healthy people) and predictable losses (on the elderly and chronically ill). This paper shows how a payment system based...

Many public programs let individuals choose between publicly provided benefits and a subsidized private alternative. We investigate the determinants of health insurance choice in Medicare--a setting with vast geographic variation in the share of individuals selecting the public option versus...

We analyze the financial performance of a hypothetical portfolio of 120 mRNA vaccine candidates in the preclinical stage targeting 11 emerging infectious diseases. We calibrate the simulation parameters with input from domain experts in mRNA technology and an extensive literature review. We find...

In theory, equilibrium profits for drug patent holders would not involve significant restraints on production and patient utilization if the market had a mechanism for two-part pricing (Oi 1971) or quantity commitments (Murphy, Snyder, and Topel 2014). In fact, patent expiration has little...

Privatization has been shown to increase growth and profitability of public firms. However, effects on consumers are understudied. We study potential trade-offs in the US hospital sector where public control declined by 42% over 1983-2019. Private operators may improve hospitals' financial...