Objective: To study how changes in insurance benefit design affect medication use of older adults with mental disorders.Data sources: US Medicare claims data from 2007 to 2018.Study Design: We focus on the gradual elimination of the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap beginning in 2011, and...

Current tax law prevents workers from trading pre-tax employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) premiums for greater after-tax take-home income. Many workers thus may pay for health plans that are more expensive or have different features from plans they would directly choose for themselves. The tax...

The US employer-based health insurance tax exclusion created a system of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) with limited insurance choices and transparency that may lock employed households into health plans that are costlier or different from those they prefer to purchase. It may also prevent...

This paper analyzes the determinants of health insurance enrollment and health expenditure in Ghana using micro data from wave 7 of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 7) with emphasis on the role of risk preferences and the availability of health facilities in one's own community, neither...

The Extended Medicare Safety Net (EMSN) in Australia was designed to provide financial assistance to patients with high out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for medical treatment. The EMSN works on a calendar year basis. Once a patient incurs a specified amount of OOP costs, the EMSN provides additional...

This paper uses the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate to examine how the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) is shared among workers with varying medical expenditures at the individual level. The mandate provides identification because ESI is experience rated. To minimize...

This chapter summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of...