Does using prescription drugs off-label increase disability and medical expenditure? This paper uses a unique dataset to evaluate off-label vs. on-label drug use in the US non-institutionalized population. Patients using drugs off-label have on average $515 higher medical expenditure and...

Alan Garber and Jonathan Skinner (2008) famously conjectured that the US health care system was “uniquely inefficient” relative to other countries. We test this idea using cross-country data on prescription drug sales newly linked with an arguably objective measure of relative therapeutic...

This study provides a national analysis of how the 2014 Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions have affected aggregate prescription drug utilization. Given the prominent role of prescription medications in the management of chronic conditions, as well as the high prevalence of unmet...

We explore the effects of recent Medicaid expansions on Medicaid-financed prescriptions for evidence-based smoking cessation medications. We estimate differences-in-differences models using administrative data on the universe of prescription medications sold in retail and online pharmacies for...

Branded pharmaceutical manufacturers frequently offer "copay coupons'" that insulate consumers from cost-sharing, thereby undermining insurers' ability to influence drug utilization. We study the impact of copay coupons on branded drugs first facing generic entry between 2007 and 2010. To...

Selective contracting is an increasingly popular tool for reducing health care costs, but these savings must be weighed against consumer surplus losses from restricted access. In both public and private prescription drug insurance plans, issuers utilize preferred pharmacy networks to reduce drug...

There is much debate about whether the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill -- the greatest expansion of Medicare benefits since its creation in 1965 -- will improve the health of elderly Americans, and how much it will cost. We model how insurance affects medical care utilization, and subsequently,...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% - from 69.7 to 76.5 years - and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. We investigate whether an aggregate health...

In this paper, we use individual level data on purchases of one of the most prescribed categories of drugs (cholesterol-lowering statins) to study the responses of physicians and patients to variation in the cost of drugs. In a sample of first-time statin prescriptions to employees from a group...