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...

Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially "fast food", has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over...

Despite the well-known benefits of exercise, the time required for exercise is widely understood as a major reason for low levels of exercise in the US. Intensity of exercise can change the time required for a given amount of total exercise but has never been studied from an economic...

Competition and prospective payment have been widely used to control health care costs but may together provide incentives to selectively reduce expenditures on high-cost relative to low-cost users. We use patient discharge and hospital financial data from California to examine the effects of...