One of the benefits commonly claimed for expanded public health insurance is improved efficiency of medical care delivery, but this claim has little rigorous empirical support. We provide such support by assessing the impact of the Medicaid expansions over the 1983-1996 period on the incidence...

A standard model of addictive process is Becker and Murphy's rational addiction' model, which has the key empirical prediction that the current consumption of addictive goods should respond to future prices, and the key normative prediction that the optimal government regulation of addictive...

Evaluations of changes to the Medicaid program have focused on increases in the generosity of income cutoffs for Medicaid eligibility. Previous research shows that despite dramatic increases in the number of births paid for by the Medicaid program, women often enroll in Medicaid at the point of...

This paper explores whether choice of provider explains any of the observed infant health gradients, and if so, why poor women choose different providers than their richer neighbors. We exploit an exogenous change in policy that occurred in California in the early 1990s that suddenly increased...

Health care demand price elasticies are often estimated from samples conditioned to include only sike people. This paper shows that not only may such estimates be statistically biased, but even when properly estimated they can only be interpreted as short-run price responses.

When medical care prices and individual health needs follow stochastic processes with non-zero trends, community rating facilitates lifetime insurance and intergenerational risk sharing. While such policies are unsustainable in competitive private insurance markets, they provide the basis for...

We analyze data from the Health and Retirement Study on senior citizens' take-up of Medicare Part D. Take-up among those without drug coverage in 2004 was high; about fifty to sixty percent of this group have Part D coverage in 2006. Only seven percent of senior citizens lack drug coverage in...

Without well designed empirical studies, mathematical models are an important way to use data on needle infection for inferences about human infection. We develop a model with explicit behavioral foundations to explore an array of policy interventions related to HIV transmission among IDU. In...