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 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...

We develop a model of imperfectly competitive insurers that compete with HMOs for consumers who have private information about their health status. We illustrate two conflicting effects of increasing HMO activity on conventional insurance premiums. We term these effects market discipline -- HMO...

In markets for health services, vertical integration - common ownership of producers of complementary services - may have both pro- and anti-competitive effects. Despite this, no empirical research has examined the consequences of multispecialty physician practice - a common and increasing form...

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...

Although doctors and hospitals own their patients' medical records, state and federal laws require that they provide patients with a copy at "reasonable cost." We examine the effects of state laws that cap the fees that doctors and hospitals are allowed to charge patients for a copy of their...