This paper exploits a sharp reduction in patient cost sharing at age 70 in Japan, using a regression discontinuity design to examine its effect on utilization, health, and financial risk arising from out-of-pocket expenditures. Due to the national policy, cost sharing is 60-80 percent lower at...

Doctors and hospitals in the United States serve patients covered by many types of insurance. This overlap in the supply of health care services means that changes in the prices paid or the volume of services demanded by one group of patients may affect other patient groups. This paper examines...

Perhaps because health care is a local service sector, health economists have paid little attention to international linkages between domestic health care economies. However, the growth in domestic health care sectors is often attributed to medical innovations whose returns are earned worldwide....

Why have health care costs moderated in the last decade? Some have suggested the Great Recession alone was the cause, but health expenditure growth in the depths of the recession was nearly identical to growth prior to the recession. Nor can the Affordable Care Act (ACA) can take credit, since...

Although doctors and hospitals own their patients' medical records, state and federal laws require that they provide patients with a copy at "reasonable cost." We examine the effects of state laws that cap the fees that doctors and hospitals are allowed to charge patients for a copy of their...

Health care providers may vertically integrate not only to facilitate coordination of care, but also for strategic reasons that may not be in patients' best interests. Optimal Medicare reimbursement policy depends upon the extent to which each of these explanations is correct. To investigate, we...

Public technology assessments in general and Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) in particular have been justified by offsetting benefits of improving patient health and reducing health care spending. However, little conceptual and empirical understanding exists concerning the quantitative...

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...

This paper models the physician services market which is regulated by two government agencies. The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) sets Medicare physician fees through the newly implemented Resource Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS). The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research...

Medical care at the end of life, which is often is estimated to contribute up to a quarter of US health care spending, often encounters skepticism from payers and policy makers who question its high cost and often minimal health benefits. It seems generally agreed upon that medical resources are...