Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

There is increasing interest in expanding Medicare health insurance coverage in the U.S., but it is not clear whether the current program is the right foundation on which to build. Traditional Medicare covers a uniformset of benefits for all income groups and provides more generous access to...

A relatively small but influential economics literature is devoted to financial abuse in Medicare.Much of that literature focuses on upcoding/no upcoding for inpatient hospital care inMedicare Part A, where reimbursements requested are greater/the same as justified by the cost of care provided....

There is increasing interest in expanding Medicare health insurance coverage in the U.S., but it is not clear whether the current program is the right foundation on which to build. Traditional Medicare covers a uniformset of benefits for all income groups and provides more generous access to...

A large literature examines the effect of health insurance on mortality. We add to this literature by emphasizing two challenges in using quasi-experimental variation provided by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage expansions to study mortality. The first is non-parallel pre-treatment trends....

As presidential candidates debate health reform, the expression “Medicare for All” (“M4A”) is on repeat, yet few appear to understand precisely what Medicare is or what M4A would mean. Even more striking is that Americans are vigorously debating health reform when the ACA – President...

This paper aims at evaluating the impact of 1998 Chinese health care reform on out-of-pocket expenditure and on saving. Existing evidence on the results achieved by this reform in terms of reduction of out-of-pocket medical expenditures is still mixed and contradictory, and very little is known...

Many health care reform proposals expand insurance coverage without fundamentally changing the structure of health insurance. The stay-well plan used in Mendocino County, California, since 1979, offers an alternative insurance structure that provides direct incentives for consumers to control...

The predominant form of paying for health care in the United States (Fee-for-Service) creates inefficient incentives and leads to rising costs. A number of changes were incorporated into the health care reform legislative package of 2010, but these changes will not stop rising costs. Instead,...