There are many technology platforms that bring benefits only when users share data. In healthcare, this is a key policy issue, because of the potential cost savings and quality improvements from ‘big data’ in the form of sharing electronic patient data across medical providers. Indeed, one...

Conflicting trends confound the pharmaceutical industry. The productivity of pharmaceutical innovation has declined in recent years. At the same time, the cohort of large companies who are the leading engines of pharmaceutical R&D has become increasingly concentrated. The concurrent presence of...

Managed Care (MC) is expected to provide health care at a lower cost than conventional provision. Therefore, Switzerland intends to promote MC by forcing health insurers to write MC contracts and introducing budgetary co-responsibility for ambulatory care physicians. A discrete choice experiment...

Disabled individuals under 65 years old account for 15% of Medicaid recipients but half of all Medicaid spending. Despite their large cost, few studies have investigated the effects of Medicaid expansions for disabled individuals on insurance coverage and crowd-out of private insurance. Using an...

Prior studies suggest that hospital care is countercyclical among Medicare beneficiaries, and if anything, procyclical among the non-elderly. In this paper, we provide the first physician-level analysis of changes in healthcare provision to Medicare and privately insured patients across the...

Most government employees have access to retiree health coverage, which provides them with group health coverage even if they retire before Medicare eligibility. We study the impact of retiree health coverage on the labor supply of public sector workers between the ages of 55 and 64. We find...

Priorities for public health innovations are typically not considered equally by all members of the public. When faced with a choice between various innovation options, it is, therefore, possible that some respondents eliminate and/or select innovations based on certain characteristics. This...

A major factor weighing down the long-term finances of state and local governments is the obligation to fund retiree benefits. While state and local government pension obligations have been analyzed in great detail, much less attention has been paid to the costs of the other major retiree...

This paper examines the trade-off between wages and employer spending on health insurance for public sector workers, and the relationship between coverage and hours worked. Our primary approach compares trends in wages and hours for public employees with and without state/local government...

We study whether employer premium contribution schemes could impact the pricing behavior of health plans and contribute to rising premiums. Using 1991–2011 data before and after a 1999 premium subsidy policy change in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), we find that the...