Risk adjustment of payments to health plans is fundamental to regulated competition among private insurers, which serves as the basis of national health policy in many countries. To date, estimation and evaluation of a risk adjustment model has been a two-step process. In a first step, the...

The Affordable Care Act's taxes, subsidies, and regulations significantly alter terms of trade in both goods and factor markets. We use a multi-sector (intra-national) trade model to predict and quantify consequences of the Affordable Care Act for the incidence of health insurance coverage and...

Some states have not adopted the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions due to concerns that the expansions may impair access to care and utilization for those who are already insured. We investigate such negative spillovers using a large panel of Medicare beneficiaries. Across many...

The majority of private health insurance in the U.S. is administered or issued by for-profit insurers, but little is known about how for-profit status affects outcomes. We find that plausibly exogenous increases in local for-profit market share induced by conversions of Blue Cross and Blue...

Medicareamp;apos;s Part D offers heavily subsidized new drug coverage to 22.5 million seniors to date, of whom 16.5 million are in stand-alone drug plans (Department of Health and Human Services, 2006). The government delegated the delivery of the benefit to private insurance companies arguing...

In the Medicare Advantage (MA) market, private health insurers compete to offer plans with the most attractive premium and benefit package. Medicare provides a subsidy, based on a "benchmark payment rate", for each Medicare beneficiary a plan enrolls. We investigate how this subsidy, the primary...

Medicare currently allows beneficiaries to choose between a government-run health plan and a privately- administered program known as Medicare Advantage (MA). Because enrollment in MA is optional, conventional observational estimates of the program's impact are potentially subject to selection...

Our paper documents the large labor market wedges created by taxes, subsidies, and regulations included in the Affordable Care Act. The law changes terms of trade in both goods and factor markets for firms offering health insurance coverage. We use a multi-sector (intra-national) trade model to...

This paper develops and implements a statistical methodology to account for the equilibrium effects (aka adverse selection) in design of risk adjustment formula in health insurance markets. Our setting is modeled on the situation in Medicare and the new state Exchanges where individuals sort...