Although healthcare spending is growing at unsustainable rates in most, if not all, OECD countries, the U.S. appears least able to control its benefit growth due to the nature of its fee-for-service healthcare payment system. Consequently, the U.S. may well be in the worst long-term fiscal shape...

Medicaid's federal-state matching system of financing is the nation's largest example of fiscal federalism. Using generous federal subsidies, the Affordable Care Act incentivized states to expand Medicaid, which became a state option in the aftermath of a 2012 Supreme Court ruling. As of early...

Because the optimal level of medical malpractice liability depends on the incentives provided by the health insurance system, the rise of managed care in the 1990s may affect the relationship between liability reform and defensive medicine. In this paper, we assess empirically the extent to...

Previous research suggests that "direct" reforms to the liability system -- reforms designed to reduce the level of compensation to potential claimants -- reduce medical expenditures without important consequences for patient health outcomes. We extend this research by identifying the mechanisms...

Improvements in medical treatment have contributed to rising health spending. Yet there is relatively little evidence on whether the spending increase is "worth it" in the sense of producing better health outcomes of commensurate value--a critical question for understanding productivity in the...

This study exploits over 5,000 variations in subsidy generosity across ages and municipalities in Japan to examine how children respond to healthcare prices. We find that free care significantly increases outpatient spending, with price elasticities considerably smaller than for adults. Price...

General medical care in the United States has historically been provided by physicians who care for their patients in both ambulatory and hospital settings. Care is now increasingly divided between physicians specializing in hospital care (hospitalists) and ambulatory-based care primary care...

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...

Despite the popularity of pay-for-performance (P4P) among health policymakers and private insurers as a tool for improving quality of care, there is little empirical basis for its effectiveness. We use data from published performance reports of physician medical groups contracting with a large...

One of the most important debates among health economists in rich nations is whether advances in biotechnology will spare their health care systems from a financial crisis. We must consider that prevalence rates of chronic diseases declined during the twentieth century and that this rate of...