Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new...

Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....

Many health economists demand more competition in the health care system. They focus on the competition between sickness funds for insured and the competition between health care providers for contracts with sickness funds. But they neglect the competition between health care providers for...

We study the effects of "balance billing", i.e., allowing physicians to charge a fee from patients in addition to the fee paid by Medicare. First, we show that on pure efficiency grounds the optimal Medicare fee under balance billing is zero. An active Medicare policy thus can only be justified...

Incentive contracts for gatekeepers who control patient access to specialist medical services provide too weak incentives to investigate cost further when expected cost of treatment is greater than benefit. Making gatekeepers residual claimants with a fixed fee from which treat-ment costs must...

Medicare pricing is known to indirectly influence provider prices and care provision for non-Medicare patients; however, Medicare's regulatory externalities are less well-understood. We study such implications by examining how physicians' outpatient surgery setting preferences respond to the...

Incentive contracts for gatekeepers who control patient access to specialist medical services provide too weak incentives to investigate cost further when expected cost of treatment is greater than benefit. Making gatekeepers residual claimants with a fixed fee from which treatment costs must be...

Historically, Medicare has operated under the assumption that health care providers respond to reductions in reimbursement through increased provision of services in an effort to offset declining practice revenue; however, recent empirical work examining fee reductions has found either small...

Despite promises that Medicare would not interfere with patients' ability to choose their physician and to purchase additional health coverage on the open market, over the decades Medicare rules and regulations have gradually eroded senior citizens' ability to control their healthcare choices....

Medicaid plays a vital role in the U.S. health care system and the importance of office-based physician practices to the care of Americans served cannot be overstated. Despite increases in program enrollment, a number of sources report that the proportion of U.S. office-based physicians willing...