Considerable attention in the U.S. has been focused on the development of high deductible insurance plans, largely with the expectation that consumers facing the full price of medical care will make more efficient consumption choices. While moving to higher deductibles should reduce spending...

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...

We examine the extent to which hospital technologies are associated with growth in U.S. hospital costs. We create an index capturing the availability of a range of technologies in 2214 hospitals and track over the period 1996-2007, along with financial information from Medicare Cost Reports. We...

We test whether the generosity of employer-sponsored health insurance facilitates the exercise of market power by hospitals. We construct indices of health plan generosity and the price and volume of hospital services using data from Truven MarketScan for 601 counties from 2001-2007. We use...

In this paper, we estimate how hospital ownership of physicians' practices affects their patients' hospital choices. We match data on the hospital admissions of Medicare beneficiaries, including the identity of their admitting physician, with data on the identity of the owner of the admitting...