Introducing compulsory health insurance for government employees bears immense importance for stepping towards universal healthcare coverage in Bangladesh. Lack of scientific study on designing such scheme, in the Bangladesh context, motivates this paper. The study aims at designing a...

Health insurance reform in Massachusetts lowered the financial cost of both pregnancy (by increased coverage of pregnancy-related medical events) and pregnancy prevention (by increasing access to reliable contraception and family planning). We examine fertility responses for women of...

I find causal evidence that Hurricane Katrina increased stress, smoking, binge drinking, and health insurance coverage in the non-impacted storm surge region. In this region, Hurricane Katrina increased health insurance coverage by 440,000 young adults, the number of smokers by 930,000, and the...

This paper describes how state-of-the-art methods of choice modeling can be used to analyze consumer choice behavior in "competitive" health insurance markets. I use the insurance choices of senior citizens in the U.S. as an example. I then consider the issue of whether consumers benefit when we...

Recent advances in "simulation based inference" have made it feasible to estimate discrete choice models with several alternatives and rich patterns of consumer taste heterogeneity. These new methods have important potential application in health economics. One important application is the...

This study has two objectives. First, it proffers and then empirically investigates what is being identified as the "small firm hypothesis," i.e., a hypothesis that the greater the percentage of firms in the U .S. that are "small," the greater the percentage of the population that can be...

This study empirically investigates determinants of enlistment in the U.S. Army over the period 1974 through 2008. The emphasis is on the impacts of both the availability of free medical care and the challenges of addressing higher medical care inflation. The study estimates reveal that the...

The objective of this study is to proffer and then empirically investigate for the U.S. what is being identified as the “small firms hypothesis,” i.e., a hypothesis that the greater the percentage of firms that are “small,” the greater the percentage of the population that will be...

Having low income is one of the requirements for Medicaid eligibility. Given that earning ability is unobservable, once an individual with high labor income stops working it is impossible to distinguish him from those whose potential labor income is low. This can affect the ability of Medicaid...

This study seeks to identify key determinants of the percent of the population enrolled in HMOs. The HMO enrollment rate is an increasing function of the unionization rate and female labor force participation rate, while being a decreasing function of the poverty rate, the unemployment rate, and...