This work takes the perspectives of economics and public health to study issues related to the quality of hospital care.The first chapter introduces the concept of quality of care in economics and public health. We show that the two fields use similar definitions of the concept but explore...

We study age-rating restrictions in the health insurance marketplaces introduced by the Affordable Care Act. Because most buyers are subsidized, although age-rating restrictions affect pre-subsidy premiums, participation is primarily driven by subsidy generosity rather than pricing decisions....

Certificate of Need (CON) regulations — restrictions on capital investment — are a key feature of the regulatory environment facing the US hospital industry, yet there is remarkably little evidence on how these regulations affect hospital investment and patient care in practice. In this...

This report focuses on three major state law issues: tort liability, scope of practice, and the corporate practice of medicine doctrine. The authors argue that statutory and regulatory schemes need to be re-examined to ensure that Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) can form. For example,...

Canada's Patented Medicines (Notice Of Compliance) Regulations fail to achieve the intended purpose of balancing innovation with timely generic market entry. An examination of the inefficiencies created by the Canadian regulations reveals that key features of U.S. pharmaceutical law should be...

Health insurance is increasingly provided through managed competition, in which subsidies for consumers and risk adjustment for insurers are key market design instruments. We illustrate that subsidies offer two advantages over risk adjustment in markets with adverse selection. They provide...

We study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers. First, we find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly corrects for cost differences...

Insurers subcontract with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to administer drug insurance. PBMs typically profit from the difference between a fixed amount and the reimbursement paid to pharmacies (i.e., "spread pricing"). Some states require insurers and PBMs to use cost-plus contracts, in which...

In this paper, we discuss 10 parallels between the lack of preparation of financial system regulators prior to the GFC and the lack of preparation by public health authorities and governments prior to Covid-19. These parallels relate to: required stocks (of capital or equipment), data collection...

This manuscript summarizes a speech given at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia on May 14, 2013. The speech begins with a discussion of ethical theory and how it can be applied to the topic of government regulation of business, and proceeds to summarize some recent studies on the costs...