Medicare continues to implement payment reforms that shift reimbursement from fee-for-service towards episode-based payment, affecting average and marginal reimbursement. We contrast the effects of two reforms for home health agencies. The Home Health Interim Payment System in 1997 lowered both...

Medicare continues to implement payment reforms that shift reimbursement from fee-for-service towards episode-based payment, affecting average and marginal reimbursement. We contrast the effects of two reforms for home health agencies. The Home Health Interim Payment System in 1997 lowered both...

We investigate the role of physician agency and competition in determining health care supply and patient outcomes. A 2005 change to Medicare fees had a large, negative impact on physician profit margins for providing chemotherapy treatment. In response to these cuts, physicians increased their...

In this survey chapter on pricing and reimbursement in U.S. pharmaceutical markets, we first provide background information on important federal legislation, institutional details regarding distribution channel logistics, definitions of alternative price measures, related historical...

There are two types of selection models in the health economics literature. One focuses on choice between a fixed set of contracts. Consumers with greater demand for medical care services prefer contracts with more generous reimbursement, resulting in a suboptimal proportion of consumers in such...

In this paper, we estimate price indices for heart attack treatments, demonstrating the techniques that are currently used in official price indices and presenting some alternatives. We consider two types of price indices, a Service Price Index, which prices specific treatments provided, and a...

I look at prevention through an economic lens and make three main points. First, those advocating preventive measures are often asked how much money a given measure saves. This question is misguided. Rather preventive measures can be thought of as insurance, with a certain cost in the present...

In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for Medicaid. This lottery provides a unique opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use, financial strain, and health of...

These Chung-Hua Lectures, given at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan in December 2000, summarize work that has been done by myself and others on biases in medical care price indices. I begin by reviewing various uses of price indices and therefore why biases in the overall indices - and changes in...

I describe several changes to Medicare in the 1990s, their rationale, and their likely effects. I focus principally on issues in the administered price systems Medicare uses to pay medical providers, especially those used for post-acute care providers, Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs),...