This paper examines 313 U.S. areas for differences in medical care utilization and mortality of whites ages 65-84 in 1990. The variables included in the analysis are education, real income, cigarette sales, obesity, air pollution, percent black, and dummy variables for seven regions and five...

In many federally-subsidized insurance markets, insurers are subsidized on the basis of enrollee characteristics; in principle, subsidies that are "risk adjusted" in this way compensate insurers for ex ante differences in expected cost. Between 2010 and 2011, the subsidies in Medicare Part D...

The health costs of in-person schooling during the pandemic, if any, fall primarily on the families of students, largely due to the fact that students significantly outnumber teachers. Data from North Carolina, Wisconsin, Australia, England, and Israel covering almost 80 million person-days in...

The public debate over disability insurance has centered on concerns about individuals without severe health conditions receiving benefits. We go beyond health risk alone to quantify the overall insurance value of U.S. disability programs, including value from insuring non-health risk. We find...

A health insurer's Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) is the share of premiums spent on medical claims. The Affordable Care Act introduced minimum MLR provisions for all health insurance sold in fully-insured commercial markets, thereby capping insurer profit margins, but not levels. While intended to...

Theoretical models of competition with fixed prices suggest that hospitals should compete by increasing quality of care for diseases with the greatest profitability and demand elasticity. Most empirical evidence regarding hospital competition is limited to heart attacks, which in the U.S....

The saving patterns of retired U.S. households pose a challenge to the basic life-cycle model of saving. The observed patterns of out-of-pocket medical expenses, which rise quickly with age and income during retirement, and heterogeneous lifespan risk, can explain a significant portion U.S....

The paper examines whether, among inpatient psychiatric admissions in California, for-profit (FP) hospitals engage in cream skimming, i.e., choosing patients for some characteristic(s) other than their need for care, which enhances the profitability of the provider. We propose a novel approach...

Technological innovation in medical services can improve health, but its ability to reach patients often depends on price signals for downstream providers, which can also be discordant across production inputs. We examine such a context when Medicare sharply revises facility fees--while holding...