We analyze the effects of states' expansions of CHIP eligibility to children in higher income families during 2002-2009 on take-up of public coverage, crowd-out of private coverage, and rates of uninsurance. Our results indicate these expansions were associated with limited uptake of public...

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...

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...

We study insurers' use of prescription drug formularies to screen consumers in the ACA Health Insurance Exchanges. We begin by showing that Exchange risk adjustment and reinsurance succeed in neutralizing selection incentives for most, but not all, consumer types. A minority of consumers,...

There is an extensive literature on the extent to which public health insurance coverage through Medicaid induces less private health insurance coverage. However, little is known about the effect of other components of the health care safety net in crowding out private coverage. We examine the...

Young people with private health insurance sometimes transition to the public health insurance safety net after they get sick, but popular sources of cross-sectional data obscure how frequently these transitions occur. We use longitudinal data on almost all hospital visits in New York from 1995...

We present robust evidence on the presence of adverse selection in hospitalization insurance for low-income households. A large randomized control trial from Pakistan allows us to separate adverse selection from moral hazard, to estimate how selection changes at different points of the demand...

This paper estimates the impact of a health insurance reform on health outcomes in urban China. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey we find that this reform increases the rate of health insurance coverage significantly among workers in Non-State Owned Enterprises. The double difference...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on retirement. We first calculate retirements (and in related analyses changes in expected ages of retirement and/or Social Security claiming) between 2010, before ACA, and 2014, after ACA,...

This paper investigates the effects of market-wide changes in health insurance by examining the single largest change in health insurance coverage in American history: the introduction of Medicare in 1965. I estimate that the impact of Medicare on hospital spending is substantially larger than...