This paper analyses the effects of hospital closures in Germany in the context of emergency medical care for patients with acute myocardial infarction or hemorrhagic stroke. Using a comprehensive inpatient care data, I evaluate the extent of the impact of hospital closures between 2006 and 2012...

Hospital prices are almost completely irrational. They bear no relationship to the cost of providing the services, they are opaque, and the prices vary wildly among hospitals and payers. The craziness of hospital pricing was laid bare when the federal government released data on hospital charges...

Medical care organizations (MCOs), such as health maintenance organizations and preferred provider organizations, have become popular in recent decades because of their ability to lower consumers' healthcare costs while increasing providers' throughput. These organizations function as healthcare...

This paper analyses the Slovak health insurance system and the policy challenges it faces. It describes the structure of health coverage and health sector reforms being implemented by the Slovak government. It provides a preliminary assessment of the possible impact of such reforms, with a focus...

We study the effects of losing insurance on behavioral health - mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) - community hospitalizations. We leverage variation in public insurance eligibility offered by a large-scale Medicaid disenrollment. Losing insurance decreased SUD-related...

Major disparities in the cost of health care have made the pricing of specialist and hospital services a contentious issue in South Africa, particularly in the private sector. To help inform policy debate, this paper profiles selected experiences on the pricing of health services, competition...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

Opioid overdose deaths in older adults have increased substantially over the past two decades. This increase has occurred despite the availability of effective treatments. Methadone, one of just three medications approved by the Food & Drug Administration for opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment,...

Moral hazard and provider-induced demand may contribute to overutilization of scarce health care resources. The U.S. health care system includes several compensatory cost-containment mechanisms, but their effects depend on how patients and providers respond. We investigate hospice programs'...