ABSTRACTMedicare adjusts its payments to physicians for geographic differences in the cost of operating a medical practice, but the method it uses is imprecise. We measure the inaccuracy in its geographic adjustment factors and categorize beneficiaries by whether they live where Medicare's...

This paper empirically analyzes how often and why individuals drop their long-term care insurance (LTCI) coverage, using data from the 2002-2008 Health and Retirement Study. It finds that over a two-year period 13% of LTCI policies lapse. It also finds that the probability of an LTCI lapse...

The objective of this article is to examine whether having health insurance reduces illness-related absenteeism among older workers. A nationally representative sample of 1780 workers in the United States, aged 52--64, are drawn from the 2004--2006 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Binary...