This paper examines the trade-off between the length of treatment days and the units of service provided per day for elderly patients in the context of the initiative taken by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Japan to discourage lengthy hospital treatment and/or stay by elderly patients. By...

We document the impact of the AIDS crisis on non-AIDS related health services in fourteen sub-Saharan African countries. Using multiple waves of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for each country, we examine antenatal care, birth deliveries, and rates of immunization for children born between...

This chapter surveys experience with performance pay in developing country health programs. In doing so, it focuses on four key conceptual issues: (1) What to reward, (2) Who to reward, (3) How to reward, and (4) What unintended consequences might performance incentives create. We highlight that...

We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical policy interventions (NPIs) like “stay-at-home” orders on the spread of infectious disease. Local policies have little impact on the economy nor on local public health. Stay-at-home is only weakly associated with slower growth of Covid-19 cases....

Medicaid, the government program for providing health insurance to low-income and disabled Americans, is the largest health insurer in the United States with more than 73 million enrollees. It is also the sector of the U.S. public health insurance system that relies most heavily on the tools of...

The Affordable Care Act Marketplaces were introduced in 2014 as part of a reform of the U.S. individual health insurance market. While the individual market represents a small slice of the U.S. population, it has historically been the market segment with the lowest rates of take-up and greatest...

As health care financing, organization, and delivery innovations proliferate, the need for comprehensive, detailed data on medical spending has never been more apparent. This study builds on previous work to provide a more comprehensive accounting of medical spending at the individual level than...

Recent federal legislation has linked the price paid for health insurance benefits to current income. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, individuals and families with income as high as 400 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for premium tax credits that...

We study how physicians respond to financial incentives imposed by episode-based bundled payment (EBP), which encourages lower spending and improved quality for an entire episode of care. Specifically, we study the impact of the Arkansas Health Care Payment Improvement Initiative, a multi-payer...

This paper investigates the impact of Medicare HMO penetration on the medical care expenditures incurred by Medicare fee-for-service enrollees. We find that increasing penetration leads to reduced health care spending on fee-for-service beneficiaries. In particular, a one percentage point...