To insure policyholders against contemporaneous health expenditure shocks and future reclassification risk, long-term health insurance constitutes an alternative to community-rated short-term contracts with an individual mandate. Relying on unique claims panel data from a large private insurer...

Using a randomized field experiment, we show that health care specialists cream-skim patients by their expected profitability. In the German two-tier system, outpatient reimbursement rates for both public and private insurance are centrally determined but are significantly higher for the...

We compare healthcare spending in public and private Medicare using newly available claims data from Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending is 25 percent lower for MA enrollees than for enrollees in...

Standard theory suggests that optimal consumer cost-sharing in health insurance increases with the price elasticity of demand, yet publicly-provided drug coverage typically involves uniform cost-sharing across drugs. We investigate how private drug plans set cost-sharing in the context of...

We estimate the economic surplus created by Medicare Advantage under its reformed competitive bidding rules. We use data on the universe of Medicare beneficiaries, and develop a model of plan bidding that accounts for both market power and risk selection. We find that private plans have costs...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private long-term health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, German legislature made the...

We present a simple graphical framework to illustrate the potential welfare gains from a "top-up" health insurance policy requiring patients to pay the incremental price for more expensive treatment options. We apply this framework to breast cancer treatments, where lumpectomy with radiation...