This paper studies the relationship between medical compliance and health outcomes - hospitalization and mortality rates - using a large panel of patients residing in a local health authority in Italy. These data allow us to follow individual patients through all their accesses to public health...

The aim of the paper is to shed some light on consumers' attitudes to adopting strategies to contain the cost of medication. Using micro-data from an ad hoc survey conducted in Italy and the UK, several hypotheses are tested regarding patients' decision-making behavior and how it is influenced...

The medical record is a repository of clinical data, which can greatly enhance the quality of health and healthcare analysis. Administrative data are collected for the purpose of billing and reimbursement, and are valued by health researchers because the data are routinely audited to maintain...

This paper investigates the consequences that patients face when their regular primary care provider closes down her practice, typically due to retirement. We estimate the causal impact of closures on patients' utilization patterns, medical expenditures, hospitalizations, and health plan choice....

I estimate the welfare, both gross and net, provided by the Medicare managed care program in 1999 through 2002. First, I estimate a model of demand for the benefits offered by managed care plans to Medicare beneficiaries. I then use the demand estimates to form estimates of welfare provided by...

This paper investigates the relationship between portfolio allocation decisions and out-of-pocket healthcare expenses of elderly U.S. households. More specifically, it analyzes the impact of increasing healthcare costs on households’ assets allocation decisions between 1992 and 2006....

This paper reports experience over five years from a single large employer in the Midwestern United States that adopted a high-deductible health plan with a health savings account (HSA) for all employees. This study represents one of the longest observation periods reported with a...

What are the barriers to voluntary take-up of high-deductible plans? We address this question using a large-scale employer survey conducted after an open-enrollment period in which a new high-deductible plan was first introduced. Only 3% of the employees chose this plan, despite the...

Health care markets often lack a market force because the presence of health insurance undermines price signals. Patients have little incentive to shop for low-priced alternatives because they do not bear the full cost of their health care consumption. In turn, producers lack incentives to...

We investigate the association between age and medical spending in the U.S. using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). We estimate a partially linear seminonparametric model and construct "pure" life-cycle profiles of health spending simultaneously controlling for time effects...