The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ACA”) requires most Americans to obtain health insurance for themselves and their dependents by 2014. In a recent essay, Professor Douglas Kahn and Professor Jeffrey Kahn take issue with one of several justifications for what has...

Health insurance mandates require health insurers to provide coverage for particular health services or illnesses. This paper examines how various state health insurance mandates influence premiums and enrollment in health insurance plans. Contrary to previous studies that compare premiums...

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....

This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexi- bility (Flex) Program on rural resident hospital choice and welfare. The Flex program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital (CAH), which receives more generous reimbursement in return for...

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...

Medicare, accounts for roughly 20% of medical expenditures in the United States and is the dominant payer for many treatments. Consequently, Medicare payment policy may have diffuse consequences. Using a contemporary bundled payment reform (the “CJR” program) and a difference-in-differences...

Hepatitis C is a major public health concern due to its high rates of infection and mortality. Recent breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals not only have the potential to cure hepatitis C but could also cause large positive health externalities through reduced transmission. The high cost of these...

Medicare has increased the use of performance pay incentives for hospitals, with the goal of increasing care coordination across providers, reducing market frictions, and ultimately to improve quality of care. This paper provides new empirical evidence by using novel operations and claims data...

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...

Motivated by widely publicized concerns that there are “too many” plans, we structurally estimate (and validate) an equilibrium model of the Medicare Part D market to study the welfare impacts of two feasible, similar-sized approaches for reducing choice. One reduces the maximum number of...