In this paper we consider how the dental industry responded to the addition of fluoride to public drinking water. We take advantage of the staggered introduction of fluoridation throughout the country to analyze the changes in numbers of within-county dentists relative to physicians in the years...

Patients who receive more hospital treatment tend to have worse underlying health, confounding estimates of the returns to such care. This paper compares the costs and benefits of extending the length of hospital stay following delivery using a discontinuity in stay length for infants born close...

We study the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance program as a bellwether for designs of private, non-mandatory health insurance markets that control adverse selection and assure adequate access and coverage. We model Part D enrollment and plan choice assuming a discrete dynamic decision...

Most existing work on the price elasticity of demand for health insurance focuses on employees' decisions to enroll in employer-provided plans. Yet any attempt to achieve universal coverage must focus on the uninsured, the vast majority of whom are not offered employer-sponsored insurance. In...

Governments often contract with private firms to provide public services such as health care and education. To decrease firms' incentives to selectively enroll low-cost individuals, governments frequently "risk-adjust" payments to firms based on enrollees' characteristics. We model how risk...

From 1991 to 2003, the fraction of Medicaid recipients enrolled in HMOs and other forms of Medicaid managed care (MMC) increased from 11 percent to 58 percent. This increase was largely driven by state and local mandates that required most Medicaid recipients to enroll in an MMC plan....

In spite of the large expected costs of needing long-term care, only 10-12 percent of the elderly population has private insurance coverage. Medicaid, which provides means-tested public assistance and pays for almost half of long-term care costs, spends more than $100 billion annually on...

We examine provider responses to the Medicare inpatient rehabilitation facility (IRF) prospective payment system (PPS), which simultaneously reduced marginal reimbursement and increased average reimbursement. IRFs could respond to the PPS by changing the total number of patients admitted,...

We study the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance program as a bellwether for designs of private, non-mandatory health insurance markets, focusing on the ability of consumers to evaluate and optimize their choices of plans. Our analysis of administrative data on medical claims in Medicare...

First-year insurer participation in the Health Insurance Marketplaces (HIMs) established by the Affordable Care Act is limited in many areas of the country. There are 3.9 participants, on (population-weighted) average, in the 395 ratings areas spanning the 34 states with federally facilitated...