The Affordable Care Act (ACA) established health insurance marketplaces where consumers can buy individual coverage. Leveraging novel credit card and bank account micro-data, we identify new enrollees in the California marketplace and measure their health spending and premium payments. Following...

Consumers need information to compare alternatives for markets to function efficiently. Recognizing this, public policies often pair competition with easy access to comparative information. The implicit assumption is that comparison friction--the wedge between the availability of comparative...

Research in behavioral economics suggests that certain circumstances, such as large numbers of complex options or revisiting prior choices, can lead to decision errors. This paper explores the enrollment decisions of Medicare beneficiaries in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. During the time...

Public attention has focused on how the launch of the national health exchanges could impact the types of risks who initially enroll and thereby affect future premiums and enrollment. We introduce simple dynamics into a standard model of insurance under adverse selection to show that such...

In 1992, the United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced new insurance coverage for two preventive services influenza vaccinations and mammograms. Economists typically assume transactions occur with perfect information and foresight. As a test of the value of...

Medicare Part D enrollees face a complicated decision problem: they must dynamically choose prescription drug consumption in each period given difficult- to-find prices and a non-linear budget set. We use Medicare Part D claims data from 2006-2009 to estimate a flexible model of consumption that...

This paper studies regulated health insurance markets known as exchanges, motivated by their inclusion in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We use detailed health plan choice and utilization data to model individual-level projected health risk and risk preferences. We combine the estimated joint...

We study the demand response to non-linear price schedules using data on insurance contracts and prescription drug purchases in Medicare Part D. Consistent with a static response of drug use to price, we document bunching of annual drug spending as individuals enter the famous "donut hole,"...

We study choice over prescription insurance plans by the elderly using government administrative data to evaluate how these choices are made and evolve over time. We find that there is large "foregone savings" from not choosing the lowest cost plan that has grown over time. We develop a...

The politicization of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was extreme, with the popular moniker of "Obamacare" and 54 House attempts to repeal the law in the four years after passage. Our study set out to understand Washington state public's preferences about enrolling into ACA driven health insurance...