This article draws attention to the long-term implications of Congress' 1997-1998 budget resolution to Medicare's increased charges. Because Congress has only dealt with Medicare's short-term problems, the author contends, Medicare's long-term problems have become increasingly worse. Medicare is...

The price sensitivity of demand for nursing home care is a subject of considerable policy interest. Standard methods for measuring price responsiveness are difficult to apply to nursing home care, since accurate price information is usually unavailable and prices may reflect unmeasured quality...

In this paper I show that the Medicaid program can improve the access of financially indigent patients to nursing home care by raising the rate of return paid on Medicaid patients' care, but only at the cost of lower quality of care. To quantify the policy tradeoff, I derive expressions for the...