Increased health care spending has been argued to be largely due to technological change. Cost-effectiveness analysis is the main tool used by private and public third-party payers to prioritize adoption of the new technologies responsible for this growth. However, such analysis by payers...

This paper studies the interactions between health insurance and the incentives for innovation. Although we focus on pharmaceutical innovation, our discussion applies to other industries producing novel technologies for sale in markets with subsidized demand. Standard results in the growth and...

Economists think of medical innovation as a valuable but risky good, producing health benefits but increasing financial risk. This perspective overlooks how innovation can lower physical risks borne by healthy patients facing the prospect of future disease. We present an alternative framework...

The entry of married women into the labor force is one of the most notable economic phenomena of the twentieth century. We argue that medical progress played a critical role in this process. Improved maternal health alleviated the adverse effects of pregnancy and childbirth on women's ability to...

A puzzling feature of many medical innovations is that they simultaneously appear to reduce unit costs and increase total costs. We consider this phenomenon by examining the diffusion of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) -- a treatment for coronary artery disease -- over the...

The United States is in the midst of a revolution in health care finance, the third since the end of World War II. Medicare's prospective payment system (PPS) based on diagnosis-related groups (DRGs), the State of California's hospital-specific contracts for Medi-Cal patients, deductibles and...

This paper examines one of the possible factors which has contributed to the significant recent growth in the Social Security Administration's Disability Insurance program: that of health care incentives under the program. The examination of health care incentives involves a 2-period, 2-state...

U.S. physicians are increasingly joining multispecialty group practices. In this paper, we analyze how a primary care physician's practice type - single (SSP) versus multispecialty practice (MSP) - affects health care spending and use. Focusing on Medicare beneficiaries who change their primary...

A literature has found that medical providers inflate bills and report more conditions given financial incentives. We evaluate whether Medicare reimbursement incentives are driven more by bill inflation or coding costs. Medicare reformed its payment mechanism for inpatient hospitalizations in...

We evaluate the effect of tort reform on employer-sponsored health insurance premiums by exploiting state-level variation in the timing of reforms. Using a dataset of healthplans representing over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006, we find that caps on non-economic damages,...