We examine how substance use disorder (SUD) treatment providers respond to private insurance expansions induced by state equal coverage (‘parity') laws for SUD treatment vis-à-vis general healthcare services. Economic theory suggests that such laws will lead to changes in provider behaviors....

We compare healthcare spending in public and private Medicare using newly available claims data from Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending is 25 percent lower for MA enrollees than for enrollees in...

Reclassification risk is a major concern in health insurance. We use a rich dataset with individual-level information on health risk to empirically study one possible solution: dynamic contracts. Empirically, dynamic contracts with one-sided commitment substantially reduce the reclassification...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes several provisions designed to expand insurance coverage that also alter the tie between employment and health insurance. In this paper, we exploit variation across geographic areas in the potential impact of the ACA to estimate its effect on health...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private long-term health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, German legislature made the...

Young people with private health insurance sometimes transition to the public health insurance safety net after they get sick, but popular sources of cross-sectional data obscure how frequently these transitions occur. We use longitudinal data on almost all hospital visits in New York from 1995...

Most non-elderly Americans purchase insurance through their employers, which sponsor a limited number of plans. We estimate how much employees would be willing to pay for the right to apply their employer subsidy to the plan of their choosing. We make use of a proprietary dataset containing...

The trend towards giving consumers choice about their health plans has invited research on how good they actually are at making these decisions. The introduction of Medicare Part D is an important example. Initial plan choices in this market were generally far from optimal. In this paper, we...

The welfare associated with public insurance is often difficult to quantify because the demand for coverage is unobserved and thus cannot be used to analyze welfare. However, in many settings, individuals can purchase private insurance to supplement public coverage. This paper outlines an...

We analyze the financial value of insurance when individuals have access to credit markets. Loans allow consumers to smooth shocks across time, decreasing the value of the smoothing (across states of the world) provided by insurance. We derive a simple formula for the incremental value of...