The growth of managed care has prompted numerous questions about its impact on the quality of health care. This paper reviews evidence on the impacts of managed care on quality. Most comparisons of care for patients in different plans within similar markets suggests that there is little...

Responding to concerns about the health of poor children and mothers, Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women was expanded during the 1980s and 1990s and Medicaid fees paid to physicians for prenatal care and delivery were increased. We examine physician responses to these policy changes using...

Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. The research in Measuring and Modeling Health...

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...

We investigate the effect of managed care on the health care system, focusing on the effects managed care could have on the number and types of health care providers and their efficiency. By influencing providers, managed care may change the structure and performance of the entire health care...

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...

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...

Increases in the activity of managed care organizations are likely to have a number of implications for the structure and functioning of the US health care market. One possibility is that increases in managed care activity may have 'spillover effects,' influencing the performance of the entire...

Managed care may affect medical treatments for non-managed-care patients if it alters local market structure or physician behavior. We investigate whether higher levels of overall managed care market share are associated with greater use of recommended therapies for fee-for-service patients with...

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...