Is the opioid epidemic attributable to prescription painkillers becoming more accessible? I find that, for an average county, Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act caused approximately 175,000 more opioid units to be prescribed per year, and 4 additional opioid-related deaths per...

Effectively designed market mechanisms may reduce growth in health care spending. In this paper, we study the impact of privatizing the delivery of Medicaid drug benefits on drug spending. Exploiting granular data that allow us to examine drug utilization, we find that drug spending would fall...

Objective: To study how changes in insurance benefit design affect medication use of older adults with mental disorders.Data sources: US Medicare claims data from 2007 to 2018.Study Design: We focus on the gradual elimination of the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap beginning in 2011, and...

During the last several years, government spending on drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses has increased at more than 30% per year, with the $3 billion in 2001 Medicaid expenditures exceeding spending in any other therapeutic category. This growth has been primarily...

Using micro data on virtually all of the drugs and diseases of over 500,000 people enrolled in Puerto Rico's Medicaid program, we examine the impact of the vintage (original FDA approval year) of drugs used to treat a patient on the patient's 3-year probability of survival, controlling for...

The highly uneven distribution of Medicare payments among elderly beneficiaries, combined with the predictability of some of the expenditures, poses several challenges to the Medicare program. We present information about the distribution of Medicare expenditures among beneficiaries in specific...

In early 2004, the U.S. Government initiated the Medicare Discount Drug Card Program, which created a market for drug cards that allowed their subscribers to obtain discounts on their prescription drug purchases. Pharmacy-level prices for several drugs were posted on the program website weekly...

The federal-state Medicaid program insures 43 million people for virtually all of the prescription drugs approved by the FDA. To determine the price that it will pay for a drug treatment, the government uses the average price in the private sector for that same drug. Assuming that Medicaid...