Are many prisoners in jail or prison because of their mental illness? And if so, is mental health treatment a cost-effective way to reduce crime and lower criminal justice costs? This paper reviews and evaluates the evidence assessing the potential of expansion of mental health services for...

Using insurance claims data from nine large self-insured employers offering 26 alternative health benefit plans, we examine empirically how the composition and utilization for the treatment of depression vary under alternative organizational forms of insurance (indemnity, preferred provider...

Broad claims are frequently made that new medications will offset all or part of their costs by reducing other areas of Medicaid spending. In this paper we examine the net impact on spending for new drugs used to treat schizophrenia. We extend research in this area by taking a new approach to...

Background: Parity in insurance coverage for mental health and substance abuse has been a key goal of mental health and substance abuse care advocates in the United States during most of the past 20 years. The push for parity began during the era of indemnity insurance and fee for service...

Health plans paid by capitation have an incentive to distort the quality of services they offer to attract profitable and to deter unprofitable enrollees. We characterize plans' rationing as imposing a show that the profit maximizing shadow price depends on the dispersion in health costs, how...

This paper is concerned with the economics of mental health. We argue that mental health economics is like health economics only more so: uncertainty and variation in treatments are greater; the assumption of patient self-interested behavior is more dubious; response to financial incentives such...

In the Medicare Advantage (MA) market, private health insurers compete to offer plans with the most attractive premium and benefit package. Medicare provides a subsidy, based on a "benchmark payment rate", for each Medicare beneficiary a plan enrolls. We investigate how this subsidy, the primary...

This paper develops and implements a statistical methodology to account for the equilibrium effects (aka adverse selection) in design of risk adjustment formula in health insurance markets. Our setting is modeled on the situation in Medicare and the new state Exchanges where individuals sort...

Brand and generic drug manufacturers frequently settle patent litigation on terms that include a payment to the generic manufacturer along with a specified date at which the generic would enter the market. The Federal Trade Commission contends that these agreements extend the brand's market...

There are two types of selection models in the health economics literature. One focuses on choice between a fixed set of contracts. Consumers with greater demand for medical care services prefer contracts with more generous reimbursement, resulting in a suboptimal proportion of consumers in such...