General medical care in the United States has historically been provided by physicians who care for their patients in both ambulatory and hospital settings. Care is now increasingly divided between physicians specializing in hospital care (hospitalists) and ambulatory-based care primary care...

Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially "fast food", has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over...

Medical cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is perhaps the most widely applied tool to guide policy decisions concerning the use of health care resources. This chapter first reviews the rationale for and common practice of medical cost-effectiveness analysis. It seeks to place CEA within a...

Despite the well-known benefits of exercise, the time required for exercise is widely understood as a major reason for low levels of exercise in the US. Intensity of exercise can change the time required for a given amount of total exercise but has never been studied from an economic...

Competition and prospective payment systems have been widely used to attempt to control health care costs. Although much of the increase in medical costs over the past half-century has been concentrated among a few high-cost users of health care, prospective payment systems may provide...

Screening interventions can produce very different treatment outcomes, depending on the reasons why patients had been unscreened in the first place. Economists have paid scant attention to these complexities and their implications for evaluating screening programs. In this paper, we propose a...

Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially "fast food", has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over...