We study how physicians respond to financial incentives imposed by episode-based bundled payment (EBP), which encourages lower spending and improved quality for an entire episode of care. Specifically, we study the impact of the Arkansas Health Care Payment Improvement Initiative, a multi-payer...

In health care systems with a competitive health insurance market, governments or other sponsors (e.g. employers) often subsidize premiums to encourage enrolment. These subsidies are typically independent of plan choice leaving the absolute premium differences in place so as not to distort...

This paper is the first to use the method of instrumental variables to estimate the causal impact of youth obesity on U.S. medical care costs. We examine data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 2001-2013 and instrument for child BMI using the BMI of the child's biological mother. IV...

A health insurer's Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) is the share of premiums spent on medical claims. The Affordable Care Act introduced minimum MLR provisions for all health insurance sold in fully-insured commercial markets, thereby capping insurer profit margins, but not levels. While intended to...

As health care financing, organization, and delivery innovations proliferate, the need for comprehensive, detailed data on medical spending has never been more apparent. This study builds on previous work to provide a more comprehensive accounting of medical spending at the individual level than...

Alan Garber and Jonathan Skinner (2008) famously conjectured that the US health care system was "uniquely inefficient" relative to other countries. We test this idea using cross-country data on prescription drug sales newly linked with an arguably objective measure of relative therapeutic...

Parallel reimbursement regimes, under which providers have some discretion over which payer gets billed for patient treatment, are a common feature of health care markets. In the U.S., the largest such system is under Workers' Compensation (WC), where the treatment workers with injuries that are...

Measuring consumer responsiveness to medical care prices is a central issue in health economics and a key ingredient in the optimal design and regulation of health insurance markets. We study consumer responsiveness to medical care prices, leveraging a natural experiment that occurred at a large...

Heavily subsidizing essential health products through existing health infrastructure has the potential to substantially decrease child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. There is, however, widespread concern that poor governance and in particular limited accountability among health workers...

There is widespread agreement that the US healthcare system wastes as much as 5% of GDP, yet little consensus on what care is actually unproductive. This partly arises because of the endogeneity of patient choice of treatment location. This paper uses the effective random assignment of patients...