The nature, and normative properties, of competition in health care markets has long been the subject of much debate. In this paper we consider what the optimal benchmark is in the presence of moral hazard effects on consumption due to health insurance. Intuitively, it seems that imperfect...

Existing research on selection in insurance markets focuses on how adverse selection distorts prices and misallocates products across people. This ignores the distributional consequences of who pays the higher prices. In this paper, we show that the distributional incidence depends on the...

A central question in the debate over privatized Medicare is whether increased government payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans generate lower premiums for consumers or higher profits for producers. Using difference-in-differences variation brought about by a sharp legislative...

Private insurance firms participating in Medicare can offer up to three principal plan types: coordinated care plans (CCPs), prescription drug plans (PDPs), and private fee for service (PFFS) plans. Firms can make entry and marketing decisions separately across plan types and geographic regions....

The economic cost of the U.S. health care system goes beyond the cost of prescription drugs, doctor office visits and surgical procedures/ medical image tests. The implicit part of the cost includes the global competitiveness that the U.S. loses being an industrialized economy. The high health...

Health insurance underwriting restrictions that prohibit insurers from using disability status, gender, and age to classify risks will in theory result in greater insurance consumption by those positively impacted by the prohibition: disabled individuals, females, and older adults. Conversely,...

In the linear coinsurance problem, examined first by Mossin (1968), a higher absolute risk aversion with respect to wealth in the sense of Arrow–Pratt implies a higher optimal coinsurance rate. We show that this property does not hold for health insurance under ex post moral hazard; i.e., when...