This paper summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of smoking...

Intestinal helminths - including hookworm, roundworm, schistosomiasis, and whipworm - infect more than one-quarter of the world's population. A randomized evaluation of a project in Kenya suggests that school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs reduced school absenteeism in treatment...

There are striking disparities in morbidity and mortality by socioeconomic status (SES) within the United States. I examine pregnancy and health at birth to investigate possible mechanisms linking SES and health. I find that a limited set of maternal health habits during pregnancy, particularly...

I examine whether New York State's Prenatal Care Assistance Program (PCAP) is associated with greater use of prenatal services and improved birth outcomes. PCAP is New York State's augmented prenatal care initiative that became a part of the Medicaid program after expansion in income eligibility...

We investigate the effect of managed care on the health care system, focusing on the effects managed care could have on the number and types of health care providers and their efficiency. By influencing providers, managed care may change the structure and performance of the entire health care...

This paper analyzes the savings and health care impacts of mortality contingent claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life-insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one's life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life-insurance...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other...

This paper examines the trade-off between the length of treatment days and the units of service provided per day for elderly patients in the context of the initiative taken by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Japan to discourage lengthy hospital treatment and/or stay by elderly patients. By...

The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of the Community Health Center (CHC) on health levels in the U.S. Using infant mortality as the underlying health indicator, a time series of large counties as the data set, and multivariate regression techniques, we investigate the extent to which...

In this paper, I summarize the results of empirical studies in the areas of schooling and health, public programs and infant mortality, and government regulation of teenage smoking. My review is selective and is based on my own research. It is neutral with respect to the question of whether the...