Lengthy travel distances may explain why relatively few veterans in the United States use VA hospitals for inpatient medical/surgical care. We used two approaches to distinguish the effect of distance on VA use from other factors such as access to alternatives and veterans' characteristics. The...

Recent theoretical and empirical advances have renewed interest in monopsonistic models of the labor market. However, there is little direct empirical support for these models. We use an exogenous change in wages at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals as a natural experiment to...

Increasing managed care activity could influence the adoption and diffusion of new medical technologies. This paper empirically examines the relationship between HMO market share and the diffusion of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment. Across markets, increases in HMO market share are...

Increasing levels of HMO activity may influence health expenditures in other sectors of the market. Medicare provides FFS coverage to the majority of its beneficiaries and may thus provide a way of examining these so-called spillover effects. This paper examines 1986-1990 Medicare FFS...

This paper develops county-level estimates of HMO market share for all counties in the United States and uses them to examine the relationship between HMO market share and the fee for a normal office visit with an established patient charged by 2,845 fee-for-service (FFS) physicians. Two-stage...

Many discussions of managed care, as well as policy making and research efforts, treat managed care with a broad brush, forcing a wide variety of organizations into a single framework that facilitates discussion but abstracts from a number of key issues. Although it may be instructive to conduct...

During the last two decades, the treatment of infertility has improved dramatically. These treatments, however, are expensive and rarely covered by insurance, leading many states to adopt regulations mandating that health insurers cover them. In this paper, we explore the effects of benefit...

The challenges consumers face in acquiring and using information are a defining feature of health care markets. In this paper, we examine demand for health information on the Internet. We find that individuals in poor health are more likely than those in better health to use the Internet to...

Many questions about technology growth and development in health care call for a broad-based characterization of technology availability. In this paper, we explore the possibility of producing aggregated estimates of technology availability by constructing an index of technology availability in...