Effectively designed market mechanisms may reduce growth in health care spending. In this paper, we study the impact of privatizing the delivery of Medicaid drug benefits on drug spending. Exploiting granular data that allow us to examine drug utilization, we find that drug spending would fall...

During the last several years, government spending on drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses has increased at more than 30% per year, with the $3 billion in 2001 Medicaid expenditures exceeding spending in any other therapeutic category. This growth has been primarily...

Using micro data on virtually all of the drugs and diseases of over 500,000 people enrolled in Puerto Rico's Medicaid program, we examine the impact of the vintage (original FDA approval year) of drugs used to treat a patient on the patient's 3-year probability of survival, controlling for...

The highly uneven distribution of Medicare payments among elderly beneficiaries, combined with the predictability of some of the expenditures, poses several challenges to the Medicare program. We present information about the distribution of Medicare expenditures among beneficiaries in specific...

The federal-state Medicaid program insures 43 million people for virtually all of the prescription drugs approved by the FDA. To determine the price that it will pay for a drug treatment, the government uses the average price in the private sector for that same drug. Assuming that Medicaid...

Physicians prescribing drugs for patients with schizophrenia and related conditions are remarkably concentrated in their choice among antipsychotic drugs. In 2007 the single antipsychotic drug prescribed by a physician accounted for 66% of all antipsychotic prescriptions written by that...

Does drug treatment for depression with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) increase or decrease the risk of completed suicide? The question is important in part because of recent government warnings that question the safety of SSRIs, one of the most widely prescribed medications in...

Mental illnesses are prevalent in the United States and globally. Cost is a critical barrier to treatment receipt. We study the effects of recent and major eligibility expansions within Medicaid, a public insurance system for the poor in the U.S., on psychotropic prescription medications for...

Reported mental health problems have risen dramatically among U.S. college students over time, as has treatment for these problems. An open question is how healthcare access affects diagnosis of mental illness and treatments such as prescription psychotropic medication use. We examine the effect...